Iuriservice Ii Ontology Development

In the legal domain, ontologies enjoy quite some reputation as a way to model normative knowledge about laws and jurisprudence. While there is a multitude of ontological models to represent theoretical legal knowledge, no previous attempt to construct ontologies based on professional knowledge exists, capturing judicial expertise. We define the epistemological and ontological levels as separate issues. This paper shows the preliminary ontology development for the second version of the prototype Iuriservice, a web based intelligent FAQ for judicial use containing a repository of professional judicial knowledge, within the IST project SEKT. The iFAQ system will focus on such knowledge and will base on OPLK —Ontology of Professional Legal Knowledge— developed by Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. LPK refers to the core of professional work that contains the experience of the daily treatment of cases and is unevenly distributed within individuals as a result of their professional and personal experiences. Judges had a strong and thorough education and became experts in their domain, but they still often seek the help of senior judges or tutors to solve on-duty problems. The knowledge acquisition process has been based on an ethnographic process designed by the UAB team and the Spanish School of the Judiciary within the national SEC project, to efficiently obtain useful and representative information from questionnairebased interviews. Nearly 800 competency questions have been extracted from these interviews and the ontology is being modelled from the selection of relevant terms. Once the terms are identified, the relevant relations between those terms need also to be identified, following a middle-out strategy. Regarding ontology modelling issues, some other changes have been introduced into Iuriservice prototype II. First, several KAON applications, such as the ontology editor Oi-Modeler, have been used in order to model and visualize the domain ontology. Second, we have used two different software applications to analyze the competency questions and extract relevant concepts: TextToOnto and ALCESTE. And finally, we have also followed the DILIGENT argumentation methodology to control and trace the discussion of each of the arguments used in favor or against the introduction of a concept X as part of the domain ontology. This paper presents the preliminary Ontology of Professional Judicial Knowledge that has been extracted manually from the selection of relevant terms from nearly 200 competency questions and affirms that the modeling of this professional judicial knowledge demands the description of this knowledge as it is perceived by the judge and the abandonment of dogmatic legal categorizations.