Ontology for Nigerian Case Laws

The Nigerian judicial process is unacceptably slow and expensive. We established that efforts so far taken to expedite the judicial process which include front loading processes and opening up of more courts are more tactical than strategic. Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has the strategic capability to expedite the judicial process when properly introduced and effectively managed. This will involve at least the electronic storage of our case laws in machine processable and human readable format; which is strongly dependent on the availability of an appropriate ontology for the Nigerian judicial system. Unfortunately however, no such ontology exists for the Nigerian judicial system. Consequently, adopting the Noy and Mcguiness’ methodology, we built an ontology for Nigerian case laws (ONCL) using the Web Ontology Language (OWL) via protégé 3.5 beta editor. The ONCL was modelled using Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG).