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.

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.

Enabling information interoperability, fostering legal knowledge usability and reuse, enhancing legal information search, in short, formalizing the complexity of legal knowledge to enhance legal knowledge management are challenging tasks, for which different solutions and lines of research have been proposed. During the last decade, research and applications based on the use of legal ontologies as a technique to represent legal knowledge has raised a very interesting debate about their capacity and limitations to represent conceptual structures in the legal domain. Making conceptual legal knowledge explicit would support the development of a web of legal knowledge, improve communication, create trust and enable and support open data, e-government and e-democracy activities. Moreover, this explicit knowledge is also relevant to the formalization of software agents and the shaping of virtual institutions and multi-agent systems or environments. This book explores the use of ontologism in legal knowledge representation for semantically-enhanced legal knowledge systems or web-based applications. In it, current methodologies, tools and languages used for ontology development are revised, and the book includes an exhaustive revision of existing ontologies in the legal domain. The development of the Ontology of Professional Judicial Knowledge (OPJK) is presented as a case study.

Legal Theory, Sources of Law and the Semantic Web is an attempt to construct an integrated conceptual framework for the application-neutral and problem-neutral representation of sources of law using Semantic Web technology and concepts, and some technically straightforward extensions to Semantic Web technology based on established practices found in fielded applications. To construct this framework, the author disentangled some problems that are often mixed up in legal theory and – in extension – legal knowledge representation. The purpose of this framework is to provide a theoretical background for the creation of reusable and maintainable knowledge components representing knowledge of sources of law on the Semantic Web. These components should form a basis for the development for computer applications supporting straightforward, routine decision making problems using traditional methods. This book aims to be a work of ontology: an account of relevant aspects of the knowledge domain of law from the perspective of a legal knowledge engineer interested in sources of law. One cannot however say that the result of this work is an ontology: this book presents a mix of design principles, design patterns for knowledge representation in OWL DL and ontology fragments.

Based on workshops and conferences on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Law, this work deals with legal ontologies and Semantic Web applications, covering both theoretical aspects and practical systems.

This volume examines the basic layers of the standard-based creation and usage of legislation. In particular, it addresses the identification of legislative documents, their structure, the basic metadata and legislative changes. Since mature technologies and established practices are already in place for these layers, a standard-based approach is a necessary aspect of the up-to-date management of legislative resources. Starting out with an overview of the context for the use of XML standards in legislation, the book next examines the rationale of standard-based management of legislative documents. It goes on to address such issues as naming, the Akoma-Ntoso document model, the contribution of standard-based document management to handling legislative dynamics, meta-standards and interchange standards. The volume concludes with a discussion of semantic resources and a review on systems and projects.

The first clear guide to the Semantic Web and its upcoming impact on the business world Imagine that, in 1992, someone handed you a book about the future of something called the World Wide Web. This book claimed that through a piece of software called a "browser", which accesses "web sites", the world economy and our daily lives would change forever. Would you have believed even 10 percent of that book? Did you take advantage of the first Internet wave and get ahead of the curve? Pull is the blueprint to the next disruptive wave. Some call it Web 3.0; others call it the semantic web. It's a fundamental transition from pushing information to pulling, using a new way of thinking and collaborating online. Using the principles of this book, you will slash 5-20 percent off your bottom line, make your customers happier, accelerate your industry, and prepare your company for the twenty-first century. It isn't going to be easy, and you don't have any choice. By 2015, your company will be more agile and your processes more flexible than you ever thought possible. The semantic web leads to possibilities straight from science fiction, such as buildings that can order their own supplies, eliminating the IRS, and lawyers finally making sense. But it also leads to major changes in every field, from shipping and retail distribution to health care and financial reporting. Through clear examples, case studies, principles, and scenarios, business strategist David Siegel takes you on a tour of this new world. You'll learn: -Which industries are already ahead. -Which industries are already dead. -How to make the power shift from pushing to pulling information. -How software, hardware, media, and marketing will all change. -How to plan your own strategy for embracing the semantic web. We are at the beginning of a new technology curve that will affect all areas of business. Right now, you have a choice. You can decide to start preparing for the exciting opportunities that lay ahead or you can leave this book on the shelf and get left in the dust like last time.

This work deals with the applications of Semantic Publishing technologies in the legal domain, i.e., the use of Semantic Web technologies to address issues related to the Legal Scholarly Publishing. Research in the field of Law has a long tradition in the application of semantic technologies, such as Semantic Web and Linked Data, to real-world scenarios. This book investigates and proposes solutions for three main issues that Semantic Publishing needs to address within the context of the Legal Scholarly Publishing: the need of tools for linking document text to a formal representation of its meaning; the lack of complete metadata schemas for describing documents according to the publishing vocabulary and the absence of effective tools and user interfaces for easily acting on semantic publishing models and theories. In particular, this work introduces EARMARK, a markup meta language that allows one to create markup documents without the structural and semantic limits imposed by markup languages such as XML. EARMARK is a platform to link the content layer of a document with its intended formal semantics and it can be used with the Semantic Publishing and Referencing (SPAR) Ontologies, another topic in this book. SPAR Ontologies are a collection of formal models providing an upper semantic layer for describing the publishing domain. Using EARMARK as a foundation for SPAR descriptions opens up to a semantic characterisation of all the aspects of a document and of its parts. Finally, four user-friendly tools are introduced: LODE, KC-Viz, Graffoo and Gaffe. They were expressly developed to facilitate the interaction of publishers and domain experts with Semantic Publishing technologies by shielding such users from the underlying formalisms and semantic models of such technologies.

The two volumes LNCS 10249 and 10250 constitute the refereed proceedings of the 14th International Semantic Web Conference, ESWC 2017, held in Portorož, Slovenia. The 51 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 183 submissions. In addition, 10 PhD papers are included, selected out of 14 submissions. The papers are organized in the following tracks: semantic data management, big data, and scalability; linked data; machine learning; mobile web, sensors, and semantic streams; natural language processing and information retrieval; vocabularies, schemas, and ontologies; reasoning; social web and web science; semantic web and transparency; in use and industrial track; and PhD symposium.

"This book discusses the new technologies of semantic Web, transforming the way we use information and knowledge"--Provided by publisher.