Application of artificial intelligence to law enforcement

Abstract

The area of information retrieval is concerned, in particular, with selecting documents from a collection that will be of interest to an user with a stated information need or question. Although it remains an area of considerable theoretical and practical importance, in general it comes to be critical when one considers the organization and functioning of a Public Prosecution Service, in terms of its administrative procedures, service distribution or the application of The Law. This article describes a part of a project, the MAD's one, A Decision Support System for Legal Reasoning, with mention to the architecture and the formal model for retrieval and update of legal documents, in use at the Portuguese Public Prosecution Service. It combines agent's based technology, disjunctive logic programming to the representation of partial information, and inference based semantic nets.