Using Intuitionistic Logic as a Basis for Legal Ontologies

• Autore: Edward Hermann Haeusler - Valeria de Paiva - Alexandre Rademaker
• Carica: Associate Professor at PUC-Rio, Brazil - Computer Scientist at Rearden Commerce, Forster City, CA - Professor at EMAP/Getulio Vargas Foundation, Brazil.
• Pagine: 289-297

Using Intuitionistic Logic as a Basis for Legal Ontologies

EDWARD HE RMA NN HA EUS LE R, VALER IA DE PAIVA

ALEX AN DRE RA DE MAK ER∗

SUMM ARY:1. Introduction – 2. Jurisprudence and Intuitionism – 3. Intuitionistic

Description Logic – 4. Private International Law Using – 5. Conclusions

1. INT RODU CT ION

Classical Description Logic has been widely used as a basis for ontology

creation and reasoning in many knowledge specif‌ic domains. These specif‌ic

domains naturally include Legal Artif‌icial Intelligence. As in any other do-

main, consistency is an important issue for legal ontologies. However, due

to their inherently normative feature, coherence (consistency) in legal on-

tologies is more subtle than in other domains. Consistency, or absence of

logical contradictions, seems more diff‌icult to maintain when more than one

law system can judge a case. This is called a conf‌lict of laws. There are some

legal mechanisms to solve these conf‌licts, some of them stating privileged

fori, other ruling jurisdiction, etc. In most of the cases, the conf‌lict is solved

by admitting a law hierarchy or a law precedence. Even using these mecha-

nisms, coherence is still a major issue in legal systems. Each layer in this le-

gal hierarchy has to be consistent. Since consistency is a direct consequence

of how one deals with logical negation, negation is also a main concern of

legal systems.

Negation and subsumption play a central role in ontologycoherence. An

adequate intuitionistic semantics for negation in a legal domain comes to the

fore when we take legally valid individual statements as the inhabitants of

our legal ontology. This allows us to elegantly deal with particular situa-

tions of legal coherence, such as a conf‌lict of laws, as those solved by Private

International Law analysis. This paper brief‌ly presents our version of In-

tuitionistic Description Logic, called for Intuitionistic ( being

the canonical classical description logic system). We also discuss the jurispru-

dence foundation of our system, and show how wecan per form a coherence

analysis of “Conf‌lict of Laws in Space” by means of our system . This

∗E.H. Haeusler is Associate Professor at PUC-Rio, Brazil; V.de Paiva is a computer Scien-

tist at Rearden Commerce, Forster City,CA; A. Rademaker is a Professor at EMAP/Getulio

Vargas Foundation,Brazil.