Semantic Based Knowledge Management in e-Government Document Workflows: A Case Study for Judiciary Domain in Road Accident Trials

Abstract

Many of the activities carried out by Judges and Chancellors in Civil Trials consist in organizing the documentation attached to each Trial which they follow in order also to decide if the conditions for proposability of the application proposed in court exist, where the law lays down the requisites in this regard. With the advent of the Telematic Civil Process, all documentation is received digitally and therefore could be automatically organized and analyzed in order to facilitate the work of Judges and Chancellors. However, there is still no automatic method of organizing documents in the Italian Ministry of Justice systems and, although supported by a document organization software, Judges and registrars still have to search by reading the necessary information within the documents cataloged in such a way, not always presented uniformly by lawyers. In this paper a feasibility study for the creation of a prototype expert system has been carried out, with the objective to analyse the documentation relative to a specific category of Civil Trials, that is Road Accidents, to organize it according to a predefined document categorization, and to automatically determine the proposability of the instances presented to Courts. Natural Language Processing algorithms have been applied in order to examine the documentation, and logical rules have been designed, according to the current Italian legislation, to determine the admissibility of instances.