by Roberto Cencioni At the Lisbon Summit in March 2000, European heads of state and government set a new goal for the European Union — to become the most competitive knowled- based society in the world by 2010. As part of this objective, ICT (information and communication technologies) services should become available for every citizen, and for all schools, homes and businesses. The book you have in front of you is about Semantic Web technology and law. Law is something omnipresent; all citizens — at some points in their lives — have to deal with it. In addition, law involves a large group of professionals, and is a mul- billion business world wide. Information technology is important because it that can improve citizens’ interaction with law, as well as improve legal professionals’ work environment. Legal professionals dedicate a significant amount of their time to finding, reading, analyzing and synthesizing information in order to take decisions, and prepare advice and trials, among other tasks. As part of the “Semantic-Based Knowledge and Content Systems” Strategic Objective, the European Commission is funding projects to construct technology to make the Semantic Web vision come true. 1 The articles in this book are related to two current foci of the Strategic Objective : • Knowledge acquisition and modelling, capturing knowledge from raw information and multimedia content in webs and other distributed repositories to turn poorly structured information into machi- processable knowledge.

The book provides the reader with a unique source regarding the current theoretical landscape in legal ontology engineering as well as on foreseeable future trends for the definition of conceptual structures to enhance the automatic processing and retrieval of legal information in the Semantic Web framework. It will thus interest researchers in the domains of the SW, legal informatics, Artificial Intelligence and law, legal theory and legal philosophy, as well as developers of e-government applications based on the intelligent management of legal or public information to provide both back-office and front-office support.

Intellectual property (IP) law operates with the ontological assumption that immaterial goods such as works, inventions, and designs exist, and that these abstract types can be owned like a piece of land. Alexander Peukert provides a comprehensive critique of this paradigm, showing that the abstract IP object is a speech-based construct, which first crystalised in the eighteenth century. He highlights the theoretical flaws of metaphysical object ontology and introduces John Searle's social ontology as a more plausible approach to the subject matter of IP. On this basis, he proposes an IP theory under which IP rights provide their holders with an exclusive privilege to use reproducible 'Master Artefacts.' Such a legal-realist IP theory, Peukert argues, is both descriptively and prescriptively superior to the prevailing paradigm of the abstract IP object. This work was originally published in German and was translated by Gill Mertens.

Semantic Web technology is already changing how we interact with data on the Web. By connecting random information on the Internet in new ways, Web 3.0, as it is sometimes called, represents an exciting online evolution. Whether you’re a consumer doing research online, a business owner who wants to offer your customers the most useful Web site, or an IT manager eager to understand Semantic Web solutions, Semantic Web For Dummies is the place to start! It will help you: Know how the typical Internet user will recognize the effects of the Semantic Web Explore all the benefits the data Web offers to businesses and decide whether it’s right for your business Make sense of the technology and identify applications for it See how the Semantic Web is about data while the “old” Internet was about documents Tour the architectures, strategies, and standards involved in Semantic Web technology Learn a bit about the languages that make it all work: Resource Description Framework (RDF) and Web Ontology Language (OWL) Discover the variety of information-based jobs that could become available in a data-driven economy You’ll also find a quick primer on tech specifications, some key priorities for CIOs, and tools to help you sort the hype from the reality. There are case studies of early Semantic Web successes and a list of common myths you may encounter. Whether you’re incorporating the Semantic Web in the workplace or using it at home, Semantic Web For Dummies will help you define, develop, implement, and use Web 3.0.

Ontology was once understood to be the philosophical inquiry into the structure of reality: the analysis and categorization of ‘what there is’. Recently, however, a field called ‘ontology’ has become part of the rapidly growing research industry in information technology. The two fields have more in common than just their name. Theory and Applications of Ontology is a two-volume anthology that aims to further an informed discussion about the relationship between ontology in philosophy and ontology in information technology. It fills an important lacuna in cutting-edge research on ontology in both fields, supplying stage-setting overview articles on history and method, presenting directions of current research in either field, and highlighting areas of productive interdisciplinary contact. Theory and Applications of Ontology: Philosophical Perspectives presents ontology in philosophy in ways that computer scientists are not likely to find elsewhere. The volume offers an overview of current research traditions in ontology, contrasting analytical, phenomenological, and hermeneutic approaches. It introduces the reader to current philosophical research on those categories of everyday and scientific reasoning that are most relevant to present and future research in information technology.

Based on author's thesis from the Dutch Research School for Information and Knowledge Systems.

The inspiring idea of this workshop series, Artificial Intelligence Approaches to the Complexity of Legal Systems (AICOL), is to develop models of legal knowledge, concerning organization, structure and content, in order to promote mutual understanding and communication between different systems and cultures. Complexity and complex systems describe recent developments in AI and law, legal theory, argumentation, the Semantic Web, and multi-agent systems. The aim of the AICOL workshops is thus to offer effective support for the exchange of knowledge and methodological approaches between scholars from different scientific fields, by highlighting their similarities and differences. The comparison of multiple formal approaches to the law (such as logical models, cognitive theories, argumentation frameworks, graph theory, game theory), as well as opposite perspectives like internal and the external viewpoints, this volume stresses possible convergences, as, for instance, are possible in the realms of conceptual structures, argumentation schemes, emergent behaviors, learning evolution, adaptation, and simulation. This volume assembles 15 thoroughly refereed and revised papers, selected from two workshops organized at the XXIV World Congress of Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy (IVR, Beijing, China, September 15-20, 2009) and at JURIX-09 (December 16-19, 2009, Rotterdam). The papers are organized in topical sections on language and complex systems in law, ontologies and the representation of legal knowledge, argumentation and logics, as well as dialogue and legal multimedia.

This book includes revised selected papers from five International Workshops on Artificial Intelligence Approaches to the Complexity of Legal Systems, AICOL VI to AICOL X, held during 2015-2017: AICOL VI in Braga, Portugal, in December 2015 as part of JURIX 2015; AICOL VII at EKAW 2016 in Bologna, Italy, in November 2016; AICOL VIII in Sophia Antipolis, France, in December 2016; AICOL IX at ICAIL 2017 in London, UK, in June 2017; and AICOL X as part of JURIX 2017 in Luxembourg, in December 2017. The 37 revised full papers included in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected form 69 submissions. They represent a comprehensive picture of the state of the art in legal informatics. The papers are organized in six main sections: legal philosophy, conceptual analysis, and epistemic approaches; rules and norms analysis and representation;legal vocabularies and natural language processing; legal ontologies and semantic annotation; legal argumentation; and courts, adjudication and dispute resolution.

Recent years have seen much new research on the interface between artificial intelligence and law, looking at issues such as automated legal reasoning. This collection of papers represents the state of the art in this fascinating and highly topical field.

The use of ontologies for data and knowledge organization has become ubiquitous in many data-intensive and knowledge-driven application areas, in science, industry, and the humanities. At the same time, ontology engineering best practices continue to evolve. In particular, modular ontology modeling based on ontology design patterns is establishing itself as an approach for creating versatile and extendable ontologies for data management and integration. This book is the very first comprehensive treatment of Ontology Engineering with Ontology Design Patterns. It contains both advanced and introductory material accessible for readers with only a minimal background in ontology modeling. Some introductory material is written in the style of tutorials, and specific chapters are devoted to examples and to applications. Other chapters convey the state of the art in research regarding ontology design patterns. The editors and the contributing authors include the leading contributors to the development of ontology-design-pattern-driven ontology engineering.