by Roberto Cencioni At the Lisbon Summit in March 2000, European heads of state and government set a new goal for the European Union -- to become the most competitive knowled- based society in the world by 2010. As part of this objective, ICT (information and communication technologies) services should become available for every citizen, and for all schools, homes and businesses. The book you have in front of you is about Semantic Web technology and law. Law is something omnipresent; all citizens -- at some points in their lives -- have to deal with it. In addition, law involves a large group...

Approaches to legal ontologies constitutes a collective reflection on the foundations of legal ontology engineering, by exploring current methodologies and theoretical approaches to defining legal ontologies, their divergences and complementarity and the challenges still to be faced. It gathers contributions from leading experts regarding their theoretical commitments and methodological approaches derived from a long experience in the area and presents a mature reflection on achievements and current shortcomings. The various authors reconstruct their concrete methodological frameworks by...

This book constitutes revised selected papers from the two International Workshops on Artificial Intelligence Approaches to the Complexity of Legal Systems, AICOL IV and AICOL V, held in 2013. The first took place as part of the 26th IVR Congress in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, during July 21-27, 2013; the second was held in Bologna as a joint special workshop of JURIX 2013 on December 11, 2013. The 19 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in this book. They are organized in topical sections named: social intelligence and legal conceptual models; legal...