Legal ontology of sales law application 3 to ecommerce

7 Abstract. Legal codes, such as the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) examined in this article, are 8 good points of entry for AI and ontology work because of their more straightforward adaptability 9 to relationship linking and rules-based encoding. However, approaches relying on encoding solely 10 on formal code structure are incomplete, missing the rich experience of practitioner expertise that 11 identifies key relationships and decision criteria often supplied by experienced practitioners and 12 process experts from various disciplines (e.g., sociology, political economics, logistics, operations 13 research). This research focuses on the UCC because it transcends the limitations of a formal code, 14 functioning essentially as a composite. AI work can benefit from real-world codes like the UCC, 15 which are essentially formal codes enlightened from a more realistic experience-base from centuries 16 of development in international commercial transactions settings. This paper then describes our 17 initial work in converting an expert system on the U.S. law governing the sale of goods from 18 Article II of the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC), into a knowledge-based system using the Web 19 Ontology Language OWL.