Ontology Representation - Design Patterns and Ontologies that Make Sense

legal agency classified behaviour (allowed/disallowed) responsible agent(s) social behaviour (states of affairs, stories) Commonsense Knowledge Figure 6.1: The Funtional Ontology of Law Normative knowledge reflects the regulatory nature of law, and has two functions: prescribing behaviour, and defining a standard of comparison for social reality. A norm expresses an idealisation: what ought to be the case (or to happen) according to the will of the agent that created the norm (Kelsen, 1991). Meta-legal knowledge governs relations between norms, and is applied when solving normative conflicts (Elhag et al., 1999), and determining the preference ordering of norms (Boer, 2009). Legal principles such as lex specialis, lex superior and lex posterior are types of meta-legal knowledge. Because law governs the behaviour of agents in the world, it must contain some description of this behaviour. The separation between the knowledge used to describe the world and the normative knowledge was first explicitly proposed in Breuker (1990), where this category was called world knowledge, or the Legal Abstract Model (LAM). This model functions as an epistemological interface between the legal system and social reality. World knowledge consists of definitional knowledge and causal knowledge and defines legal concepts and (causality) principles as abstractions of commonsense concepts. The knowledge needed to attribute responsibility given the legal (causal) interpretation of some story or state of affairs, is characterised as responsibility knowledge. The functional ontology of law describes the path along which a formal account travels as it is under consideration of the legal system (see Figure 6.1). When an account ‘enters’ the legal system, it is enriched with legal vocabulary, i.e. it is interpreted and legally qualified. The causal relations between events described in the account are identified. This interpreted causal account is then considered for norm violations, using some body of normative knowledge (rules, legislation, precedents), and liability is determined for agents 6.