A Legal Document Ontology: The Missing Layer in Legal Document Modelling

Abstract

This paper presents a mechanism for adding meaningful semantics on top of the CEN Metalex standard for permitting heterogeneous legal resource management. The results developed within the Estrella project and the integration with other national and international standards envisage the possibility to use CEN Metalex as a neutral document standard in many situations where legal information resources are involved: as intermediate data format for fostering long term preservation of legal documents, as a tool for interoperability between legacy systems, as an interchange data format between different application layers, as a conversion mechanism across versions of the same standard. CEN Metalex permits also to build interesting applications of CMS for heterogeneous legal resource information. For exploiting these potentialities CEN Metalex needs to be enriched with a legal document ontology and moreover to an intermediate layer called LMIF for adding semantic to the general structural layer. This work presents how to foster CEN Metalex using LMIF and how to connect this layer with an abstract legal document ontology.