The Legal Concepts and the Layman's Terms - Bridging the Gap through Ontology-Based Reasoning about Liability

The aim of the BEST-project is to support laymen in judging their legal position through intelligent disclosure of case-law in the area of Dutch tort law. A problem we have to face in this context is the discrepancy between the terminology laymen use to describe their case and the terminology found in legal documents. We address this problem by supporting users to describe their case in common sense terms taken from an ontology. We use logical reasoning to automatically determine law articles that are relevant for determining liability of parties in a case based on this description, thus bridging the gap between the laymen’s description and the terminology relevant for certain articles that can be found in legal documents. We introduce the BEST-project and describe the ontology built for supporting case descriptions focussing on its use for automatically determining relevant articles of law.