Foreword

• Autore: Enrico Francesconi
• Carica: Researcher at ITTIG
• Pagine: 169-170

Foreword

Over the last years management of legal information has been signif‌i-

cantly inf‌luenced by formalized and shared knowledge modelling, organized

in thesauri, taxonomies, semantic networks or ontologies. In particular, le-

gal reasoning, advanced semantic and cross-language legal information re-

trieval, legal drafting and document classif‌ication, have proved to be fertile

areas where knowledge modelling is successfully applied.

Legal ontologies usually play the role of shared vocabularies as well as

formal conceptualisation of legal notions. They often stand in the tradition

of legal theory and philosophy, but may be grounded in common sense as

well.

Legal ontologies are usually used in different applications as multilingual

document annotation and drafting, multilingual legal information retrieval,

legal reasoning, case-based reasoning, legal assessment, legal concepts com-

parison and harmonization. Moreover the ways in which ontologies are

developed and used (as either bottom-up or top-down, hand-crafted or auto-

matically, or semi-automatically, constructed) is a matter of wide discussion

in the legal information scientif‌ic community.

This special issue of the “Informatica e Diritto” Journal on Legal On-

tologies and Artif‌icial Intelligence Techniques aims to offer an overview of

theories and well-founded applications that combine Legal Ontologies and

AI techniques, with regard both to theories and implementations. It in-

cludes revised versions of the contributions presented at the fourth edition

of the Workshop on Legal Ontologies and Artif‌icial Intelligence Techniques

(LOAIT) held on July 7th, 2010 in Fiesole (Italy), in conjunction with Deon

20101.

The f‌irst three editions of the LOAIT Workshop, held in conjunction

with ICAIL Conference2(2005 – Bologna, 2007 – San Francisco, 2009 –

Barcelona), provided valuable opportunities for researchers and practition-

ers in Artif‌icial Intelligence and Law to discuss problems, exchange informa-

tion and compare perspectives on legal ontologies and their use.

A selection of papers of LOAIT ’07 were published in the volume J.

Breuker, P. Casanovas, M. Klein, E. Francesconi (eds.), Law, Ontologies and

110th International Conference on Deontic Logic in Computer Science.

2International Conference on Artif‌icial Intelligence and Law.