Requirements of legal knowledge management systems to aid normative reasoning in specialist domains

Abstract

This paper discusses the challenges of legal norms in specialist domains - the interplay between industry/professional standards and legal norms, the information gap between legal and specialist domains and the need for interpretation at all stages of compliance - design, operation and justification. We propose extensions to the Eunomos legal knowledge management tool to help address the information gap, with particular attention to aligning norms with operational procedures, and the use of domain-specific specialist ontologies from multiple domains to help users understand and reason with norms on specialist topics. The paper focuses mainly on medical law and clinical guidelines.