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The Legal Concepts
and the Layman’s Terms Bridging the Gap through
Ontology-Based Reasoning about Liability Ronny van Laarschot a Wouter van
Steenbergen b Heiner Stuckenschmidt a Arno R. Lodder b Frank van Harmelen a a Department of Artificial Intelligence, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam b Computer/Law Institute, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam Abstract. 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. Keywords. Legal Ontologies,
Logical Reasoning, Mediation, Document Retrieval |
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