An OWL ontology library representing judicial interpretations

The article introduces JudO, an OWL2 ontology library of legal knowledge that relies on the metadata contained in judicial documents. JudO represents the interpretations performed by a judge while conducting legal reasoning towards the adjudication of a case. To the aim of this application, judicial interpretation is intended in the restricted sense of the acts of judicial subsumption performed by the judge when he considers a material instance (token in Searle’s terminology), and assigns it to an abstract category (type). The ontology library is based on a theoretical model and on some specific patterns that exploit some new features introduced by OWL2. JudO provides meaningful legal semantics, while retaining a strong connection to source documents (fragments of legal texts). The application task is to enable detection and modeling of jurisprudence-related information directly from the text, and to perform shallow reasoning on the resulting knowledge base. The ontology library is also supposed to support a defeasible rule set for legal argumentation on the groundings of judicial decisions.