Modeling Cybercrime with UFO: An Ontological Analysis of Non-Consensual Pornography Cases

Abstract

The legal domain has challenging aspects. One is that legislation is written to regulate an unpredictable number of cases and, therefore, the language of the law is made of open texture and ambiguous terms. Another peculiarity is that each country has its own legislation, often using the common legal expressions but with different meanings. This results in difficulty in understanding supranational cases and in the interoperability of knowledge bases as well. For example, cybercrimes, in particular, image-based sexual abuses (also known as “revenge porn” or non-consensual pornography) are on the rise globally. Several countries are responding to this social issue by adopting dedicated regulations. However, these regulations are still fragmented, do not share a common conceptualization. In this work, we face these challenges by proposing the application of an ontology-based conceptual modeling to represent a set of concepts and legal relations in cybercrime law. To evaluate the model built, we analyzed the subdomain of cybercrimes, in particular, cases of non-consensual pornography on digital platforms. The result is a conceptualization capable of being shared with other models, increasing the interoperability and clarity of the meaning of common terms and relations found in the various laws studied.