A Legal Ontology of Relationships for Civil Law System

The civil law system is highly characterized by relationships. The general rule is that any document of this domain is always embedded in a context of the legal order. The legal order can be defined as a set of norms; thus, understanding concepts of a legal norm is important to understanding other legal norms. However, this feature impairs knowledge of the law, since a thorough understanding of a norm requires a specific knowledge for understanding the dependence between legal norms. Considering the difficulty in undeciphering this knowledge, this paper highlights the importance of modeling relationships between legal norms in a civil law system. In the present paper, we propose an ontology aiming to capture a clear, concise and unambiguous view of this domain, as well as systematize and reveal the dependence between legal norms with an emphasis on relationships existing in civil law. With such an ontology, we expect to provide a shared understanding of the concepts and relationships, enabling interoperability. Due to the complexity of the domain, we developed a reference ontology written in OntoUML. In the paper, we underline the major aspects of our ontology and emphasize its potential application as a semantic reference for various civil law systems in the world.