Design Patterns for Legal Ontology Constructions

Ontology design is known to be a difficult task, requiring much more than expertise in an area; legal ontology design, due to the complexity of its domain, makes those difficulties worse. That may be partly due to poor requirement analysis in existing tools, but there is also an inherent gap between the purely logical constructs and methods that are expected to be used, and the actual competences and thought habits of domain experts. This paper presents some solutions, based on content ontology design patterns, which are intended to make life of legal ontology designers easier. An overview of the typical tasks and services for legal knowledge is presented, the notion of ontology design pattern is introduced, and some excerpts of a reference ontology (CLO) and its related patterns are included, showing their utility in a simple legal modeling case