Re: [legaldocml] RE: Legal Ontologies to Embed within AKN

[Fabio Vitali <fabio@cs.unibo.it>]

*** WARNING: Many subtle and pointless sophisms ahead. You have been warned. ***

Hello, 

let me perform by best impression of a University Professor, and add some confusion to this discussion. 

I think it is important to have clear understanding of the purposes of metadata when associated to a document. Akoma Ntoso provides a number of "anchors", for associating assertions to a document, but (on purpose) provides very little in terms of organization and structuring of said metadata. 

For instance, an important target of metadata is the description of the topics of a document, or subjects. Understanding what is a subject in a document is the point of a long and incredibly sophisticated and subtle discussion in literature (look for "aboutness" on wikipedia and from there onward). Akoma Ntoso provides a specific mechanism (<keyword>) to make a number of subject-related assertions for the document as a whole and for individual fragments of it. Each keyword element contains a term that is expected to be taken from a vocabulary of terms that, hopefully, provide a systematic and organized view of the subjects within a certain domain. 

Most often, these systematic and organized views take the form of a thesaurus, which is a structured and interconnected collection of terms, some of whose connections are hierarchical in nature. For instance, an important thesaurus for the organization of topics of the public administration is surely the Eurovoc, available at http://eurovoc.europa.eu/ . In Eurovoc, say, Tax Evasion is defined as a narrower term of Tax Offence, which is defined as a narrower term of Economic Offence, which is a narrower term of Offence, which is a narrower term of Criminal Law, which is a narrower term of Law. 

Thus by associating the term "Tax Evasion as intended in Eurovoc" to (a fragment of) an Akoma Ntoso document, we can immediately deduce that it also talks about Tax Evasion, Tax Offence, Offence, Criminal Law and Law. Yet, the Akoma Ntoso document does not contain nor refer to this whole list of terms, but simply contains the narrowest one (i.e., the most precise) and everything else come from inferencing. 

SKOS comes into play as the most appropriate conceptual scaffolding to create thesauri, such as the one in Eurovoc. In SKOS, one can specify the relationships existing between items of a restricted vocabulary of terms, and assert, for instance, that Tax Evasion is a narrower term of Tax Offence. This is simply done with the following OWL assertions: 

@prefix skos: <http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#> .
@prefix fv: <http://www.fabiovitali.it/thesaurus#> .

fv:TaxEvasion                     // Let's define an instance whose id is TaxEvasion within the fv namespace
  a skos:Concept ;                // This entity is an instance of the class Concept from SKOS
  skos:prefLabel "Tax Evasion" ;  // The preferred label for this instance (the one that should be used) is Tax Evasion
  skos:narrower fv:TaxOffence .   // This instance is a narrower Concept than the instance whose id is TaxOffence within the fv namespace
fv:TaxOffence                     // etc. 
  a skos:Concept ;
  skos:prefLabel "Tax Offence" ;
  skos:broader  fv:TaxEvasion .
  skos:narrower fv:Offence .
... etc. 

What are the relations between Eurovoc, SKOS and Akoma Ntoso? Very few. Akoma Ntoso behaves nicely when you use terms from a thesauri, including Eurovoc, but does not dictate you to use any specific syntax, ontology or approach. Similarly, Eurovoc is quite straightforwardly expressed in SKOS, but can be expressed in any other model that can describe organized vocabularies of terms. 

And, do not forget that we are only talking about subjects, or the "aboutness" of a document. Other types of metadata assertions are similarly heavily structured, available in a number of conceptual models, and describable using a number of different ontologies (among which, for instance, LKIF o CEN Metalex). Akoma Ntoso provides many anchors for arbitrary assertions about the content and the technical aspects of a document, most notably in the References section, but does not choose nor prefer any existing vocabulary.  

I hope I was able to add some more dust in an already heavily muddy discussion. 

Ciao

Fabio

--

Il giorno 06/feb/2013, alle ore 21.54, McGibbney, Lewis John ha scritto:

> Thank you Roger.
> Lewis
> ________________________________________
> From: legaldocml@lists.oasis-open.org [legaldocml@lists.oasis-open.org] On Behalf Of Sperberg, Roger (LNG-NYC) [roger.sperberg@lexisnexis.com]
> Sent: 06 February 2013 20:06
> To: McGibbney, Lewis John; legaldocml@lists.oasis-open.org
> Subject: [legaldocml] RE: Legal Ontologies to Embed within AKN
> 
> Lewis,
> 
> It sounds as though you're looking for SKOS, a vocabulary for expressing conceptual relationships and metadata.
> 
> [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/REC-skos-reference-20090818/
> 
> Roger Sperberg
> 
> 973-200-4224 primary
> roger.sperberg@lexisnexis.com
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: legaldocml@lists.oasis-open.org [mailto:legaldocml@lists.oasis-open.org] On Behalf Of McGibbney, Lewis John
> Sent: Wednesday, February 06, 2013 2:25 PM
> To: legaldocml@lists.oasis-open.org
> Subject: [legaldocml] Legal Ontologies to Embed within AKN
> 
> Hi,
> I'm looking to expand the structured content within my AKN XML by using more than LKIF-Core [0] to represent additional metadata.
> Can anyone provide me with resources relating to more general/non-domain specific/non-localized ontological resources for use within Legal Markup?
> Thanks in advance for any resources/help :0) Lewis
> 
> [0] https://github.com/RinkeHoekstra/lkif-core/
> 
> Glasgow Caledonian University is a registered Scottish charity, number SC021474
> 
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> 
> Winner: Times Higher Education’s Outstanding Support for Early Career Researchers of the Year 2010, GCU as a lead with Universities Scotland partners.
> http://www.gcu.ac.uk/newsevents/news/bycategory/theuniversity/1/name,15691,en.html
> 
> Glasgow Caledonian University is a registered Scottish charity, number SC021474
> 
> Winner: Times Higher Education’s Widening Participation Initiative of the Year 2009 and Herald Society’s Education Initiative of the Year 2009.
> http://www.gcu.ac.uk/newsevents/news/bycategory/theuniversity/1/name,6219,en.html
> 
> Winner: Times Higher Education’s Outstanding Support for Early Career Researchers of the Year 2010, GCU as a lead with Universities Scotland partners.
> http://www.gcu.ac.uk/newsevents/news/bycategory/theuniversity/1/name,15691,en.html
> 
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--

Fabio Vitali                            Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly,
Dept. of Computer Science        Man got to sit and wonder "Why, why, why?'
Univ. of Bologna  ITALY               Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land,
phone:  +39 051 2094872              Man got to tell himself he understand.
e-mail: fabio@cs.unibo.it         Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007), "Cat's cradle"
http://vitali.web.cs.unibo.it/