Multilevel legal ontologies

Abstract

In order to manage the conceptual representation of European law we have proposed the Legal Taxonomy Syllabus (LTS) and the related methodology. In this paper we consider further issues that emerged during the testing and use of the LTS, and how we took them into account in the new release of the system. In particular, we address the problem of representing interpretation of terms besides the definitions occurring in the directives, the problem of normative change, and the process of planning legal reforms of European law. We show how to include into the Legal Taxonomy Syllabus the Acquis Principles - which have been sketched by scholars in European Private Law from the so-called Acquis communautaire -, how to take the temporal dimension into account in ontologies, and how to apply natural language processing techniques to the legal texts being annotated in the LTS. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.