Towards a High-Level Controlled Language for Legal Sources on the Semantic Web

Accessing legal regulations and legislation on the web should be improved by semantic annotation of legal rules. However, producing this type of annotations is challenging because legal language is difficult to parse automatically and any annotation involves a part of interpretation. We argue that an extended controlled language must be defined to address that issue. We present aspects of a controlled language required for such use and outline an incremental approach that supports the annotation/interpretation work to transform complex, legal natural language into a machine-parsable form.