1. BestPortal: Lessons Learned in Lightweight Semantic Access to Court Proceedings Rinke HoekstraAI Department, Vrije Universiteit AmsterdamLeibniz Center for Law, Universiteit van Amsterdamhttp://www.few.vu.nl/~hoekstra JURIX 2009

2. BestPortal Netherlands Council of the Judiciary 50 thousand verdicts Alleviate burden of the judiciary Improve access to court proceedings BEST Project “BATNA Establishment using Semantic Web Technology” Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement http://www.best-project.nl Focus: unlawful act (Tort) … typical Open Government scenario, no? JURIX 2009

3. “It’s the data, stupid!”(Tim O’Reilly) Government 2.0 Paradigm shift Public Services Open Data Wide range of information types Business registries, crime statistics, school ratings, etc. Pro-active information disclosure (user) interface browsing, search, RESTful interfaces (endpoints) open formats unique ids (URIs) JURIX 2009

4. … some examples http://data.gov http://www.statistics.gov.uk/hub http://data.gov.uk http://data.australia.gov.au http://open.org.nz W3C eGov Interest Group, http://www.w3.org/2007/eGov Microsoft Open Government Data Initiative … But… is `just the data’ good enough? JURIX 2009

5. Open Up! Make court proceedings publicly available (http://www.rechtspraak.nl) But: Full text search is not enough Laymen Lawyers Lawyers have their own language: legalese Bridge the gap between common sense and legal knowledge JURIX 2009 “A woman was kicked by a horse at a riding school.”

6. Adding Semantics Semantic annotation Direct publication as RDF Embedded RDFa Connect to other datasources Examples: CEN MetaLex, http://www.metalex.eu http://data.gov.uk http://data-gov.tw.rpi.edu (http://data.gov in RDF) But…these still do not bridge the gap JURIX 2009

7. E-Government Services Lightweight Pre-structured, shallow, narrow domain, no user input Example: Legal Services Counter (van Engers et al.,2004) Knowledge Intensive Given a ‘commonsense’ description of a case, … provide the legal qualification Examples: HARNESS (van de Ven et al., 2008) Initial approach of BEST (van Laarschot et al., 2005) JURIX 2009

8. Best Horseshoe in 2005 JURIX 2009 Case is inferred to be of some type of liability(articles 6:163-6:197 BW)

9. Problems Lightweight is inflexible Knowledge intensive is too expensive Requires complete and coherent case descriptions Significant modelling effort Maintenance costs (… especially in case law) Quality assurance Legal theoretical commitment Translations have the form of definitions But… can I use it to retrieve relevant cases? JURIX 2009

10. Search (some statistics) Type of liability, represented as an article in the Civil Code a set of prototypical cases (selected by expert) a set of relevant concepts “Fingerprints” Vector of weighted phrases Measuring precision (Uijttenbroek et al., 2008) JURIX 2009

11. So, what next? The legal qualification of a case is: Too expensive Theoretical over-commitment and Not necessarily useful for search (!) But then… how should the gap be bridged? JURIX 2009

12. Annotation Perspective Given an annotation task: A layman will describe the facts A legal professional will describe the qualification JURIX 2009 Mappings should hold between descriptions of court proceedings, not concepts.

14. A mapping is inferred given the overlap between cases that may be described using concepts

15. Mappings classify both published and hypothetical case descriptionsJURIX 2009

16. Vocabulary No definitions? No ontology… Simple Knowledge Organization System Lifting existing KOS’s to the Semantic Web Every skos:Concept is an OWL individual Lightweight semantic relations: broader, narrower, and related. Lightweight mapping relations between skos:ConceptSchemes. JURIX 2009

17. Mapping in SKOS JURIX 2009

18. BestMap Limitations of SKOS No many-to-many mappings Implicit assumption of extensionality Concepts are used to annotate resources BestMap Ontology Extend SKOS with annotation-properties A mapping is an OWL 2 class description http://www.best-project.nl/owl/bestmap.owl JURIX 2009

19. Connecting to SKOS (3) JURIX 2009

20. BestMap Mappings A mapping class: Classifies resources annotated using one vocabulary, and Infers annotations using the other vocabulary … it may be directed JURIX 2009

21. Example JURIX 2009

22. JURIX 2009

23. … but now the mappings Problem: The Good Ol’ Knowledge Acquisition Bottleneck BestMap provides little structure “Riding School” as building, owner, buyer of fodder, etc. … need for typed relations Focus on the Unlawful Act Case Frames (a.o. Winkels et al., 1998) Thematic Roles as typed relations JURIX 2009

24. Example JURIX 2009

25. Discussion Open Data and Knowledge Intensive approaches are limited Lightweight but flexible approach Extensible KA bottleneck still exists, but Minimal theoretical commitment Useful for other expertise domains (e.g. medical information) Use of standard technology (performance) Evaluation Do the mappings actually work? Does BestPortal really improve access to court proceedings? Justification of search results Publish court proceedings as linked open data e.g. connect to GeoNames JURIX 2009

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