by Roberto Cencioni At the Lisbon Summit in March 2000, European heads of state and government set a new goal for the European Union — to become the most competitive knowled- based society in the world by 2010. As part of this objective, ICT (information and communication technologies) services should become available for every citizen, and for all schools, homes and businesses. The book you have in front of you is about Semantic Web technology and law. Law is something omnipresent; all citizens — at some points in their lives — have to deal with it. In addition, law involves a large group of professionals, and is a mul- billion business world wide. Information technology is important because it that can improve citizens’ interaction with law, as well as improve legal professionals’ work environment. Legal professionals dedicate a significant amount of their time to finding, reading, analyzing and synthesizing information in order to take decisions, and prepare advice and trials, among other tasks. As part of the “Semantic-Based Knowledge and Content Systems” Strategic Objective, the European Commission is funding projects to construct technology to make the Semantic Web vision come true. 1 The articles in this book are related to two current foci of the Strategic Objective : • Knowledge acquisition and modelling, capturing knowledge from raw information and multimedia content in webs and other distributed repositories to turn poorly structured information into machi- processable knowledge.

Legal Theory, Sources of Law and the Semantic Web is an attempt to construct an integrated conceptual framework for the application-neutral and problem-neutral representation of sources of law using Semantic Web technology and concepts, and some technically straightforward extensions to Semantic Web technology based on established practices found in fielded applications. To construct this framework, the author disentangled some problems that are often mixed up in legal theory and – in extension – legal knowledge representation. The purpose of this framework is to provide a theoretical background for the creation of reusable and maintainable knowledge components representing knowledge of sources of law on the Semantic Web. These components should form a basis for the development for computer applications supporting straightforward, routine decision making problems using traditional methods. This book aims to be a work of ontology: an account of relevant aspects of the knowledge domain of law from the perspective of a legal knowledge engineer interested in sources of law. One cannot however say that the result of this work is an ontology: this book presents a mix of design principles, design patterns for knowledge representation in OWL DL and ontology fragments.

Based on workshops and conferences on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Law, this work deals with legal ontologies and Semantic Web applications, covering both theoretical aspects and practical systems.

The Semantic Web combines the descriptive languages RDF (Resource Description Framework) and OWL (Web Ontology Language), with the data-centric, customizable XML (eXtensible Mark-up Language) to provide descriptions of the content of Web documents. These machine-interpretable descriptions allow more intelligent software systems to be written, automating the analysis and exploitation of web-based information. Software agents will be able to create automatically new services from already published services, with potentially huge implications for models of e-Business. Semantic Web Technologies provides a comprehensive overview of key semantic knowledge technologies and research. The authors explain (semi-)automatic ontology generation and metadata extraction in depth, along with ontology management and mediation. Further chapters examine how Semantic Web technology is being applied in knowledge management (“Semantic Information Access”) and in the next generation of Web services. Semantic Web Technologies: Provides a comprehensive exposition of the state-of-the art in Semantic Web research and key technologies. Explains the use of ontologies and metadata to achieve machine-interpretability. Describes methods for ontology learning and metadata generation. Discusses ontology management and evolution, covering ontology change detection and propagation, ontology dependency and mediation. Illustrates the theoretical concepts with three case studies on industrial applications in digital libraries, the legal sector and the telecommunication industry. Graduate and advanced undergraduate students, academic and industrial researchers in the field will all find Semantic Web Technologies an essential guide to the technologies of the Semantic Web.

This work deals with the applications of Semantic Publishing technologies in the legal domain, i.e., the use of Semantic Web technologies to address issues related to the Legal Scholarly Publishing. Research in the field of Law has a long tradition in the application of semantic technologies, such as Semantic Web and Linked Data, to real-world scenarios. This book investigates and proposes solutions for three main issues that Semantic Publishing needs to address within the context of the Legal Scholarly Publishing: the need of tools for linking document text to a formal representation of its meaning; the lack of complete metadata schemas for describing documents according to the publishing vocabulary and the absence of effective tools and user interfaces for easily acting on semantic publishing models and theories. In particular, this work introduces EARMARK, a markup meta language that allows one to create markup documents without the structural and semantic limits imposed by markup languages such as XML. EARMARK is a platform to link the content layer of a document with its intended formal semantics and it can be used with the Semantic Publishing and Referencing (SPAR) Ontologies, another topic in this book. SPAR Ontologies are a collection of formal models providing an upper semantic layer for describing the publishing domain. Using EARMARK as a foundation for SPAR descriptions opens up to a semantic characterisation of all the aspects of a document and of its parts. Finally, four user-friendly tools are introduced: LODE, KC-Viz, Graffoo and Gaffe. They were expressly developed to facilitate the interaction of publishers and domain experts with Semantic Publishing technologies by shielding such users from the underlying formalisms and semantic models of such technologies.

This volume examines the basic layers of the standard-based creation and usage of legislation. In particular, it addresses the identification of legislative documents, their structure, the basic metadata and legislative changes. Since mature technologies and established practices are already in place for these layers, a standard-based approach is a necessary aspect of the up-to-date management of legislative resources. Starting out with an overview of the context for the use of XML standards in legislation, the book next examines the rationale of standard-based management of legislative documents. It goes on to address such issues as naming, the Akoma-Ntoso document model, the contribution of standard-based document management to handling legislative dynamics, meta-standards and interchange standards. The volume concludes with a discussion of semantic resources and a review on systems and projects.

Enabling information interoperability, fostering legal knowledge usability and reuse, enhancing legal information search, in short, formalizing the complexity of legal knowledge to enhance legal knowledge management are challenging tasks, for which different solutions and lines of research have been proposed. During the last decade, research and applications based on the use of legal ontologies as a technique to represent legal knowledge has raised a very interesting debate about their capacity and limitations to represent conceptual structures in the legal domain. Making conceptual legal knowledge explicit would support the development of a web of legal knowledge, improve communication, create trust and enable and support open data, e-government and e-democracy activities. Moreover, this explicit knowledge is also relevant to the formalization of software agents and the shaping of virtual institutions and multi-agent systems or environments. This book explores the use of ontologism in legal knowledge representation for semantically-enhanced legal knowledge systems or web-based applications. In it, current methodologies, tools and languages used for ontology development are revised, and the book includes an exhaustive revision of existing ontologies in the legal domain. The development of the Ontology of Professional Judicial Knowledge (OPJK) is presented as a case study.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th International Semantic Web Conference, ISWC 2005, held in Galway, Ireland, in November 2005. The 54 revised full academic papers and 17 revised industrial papers presented together with abstracts of 3 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 217 submitted papers to the academic track and 30 to the industrial track. The research papers address all current issues in the field of the semantic Web, ranging from theoretical aspects to various applications. The industrial track contains papers on applications in particular industrical sectors, new technology for building applications, and methodological and feasibility aspects of building industrical applications that incorporate semantic Web technology. Short descriptions of the top five winning applications submitted to the Semantic Web Challenge competition conclude the volume.

Semantic web technologies (SWTs) offer the richest machine-interpretable (rather than just machine-processable) and explicit semantics that are being extensively used in various domains and industries. This book provides a roadmap for semantic web technologies (SWTs) and highlights their role in a wide range of domains including cloud computing, Internet of Things, big data, sensor network, and so forth. It also explores the prospects of these technologies including different data interchange formats, query languages, ontologies, Linked Data, and notations. The role of SWTs in ‘epidemic Covid-19’, ‘e-learning platforms and systems’, ‘block chain’, ‘open online courses’, and ‘visual analytics in healthcare’ is described as well. This book: Explores all the critical aspects of semantic web technologies (SWTs) Discusses the impact of SWTs on cloud computing, Internet of Things, big data, and sensor network Offers a comprehensive examination of the emerging research in the areas of SWTs and their related domains Provides a template to develop a wide range of smart and intelligent applications Includes latest applications and examples with real data This book is aimed at researchers and graduate students in computer science, informatics, web technology, cloud computing, and Internet of Things.

The Web is a globalinformationspace consistingoflinked documents andlinked data. As the Web continues to grow and new technologies, modes of interaction, and applications are being developed, the task of the Semantic Web is to unlock the power of information available on the Web into a common semantic inf- mation space and to make it available for sharing and processing by automated tools as well as by people. Right now, the publication of large datasets on the Web, the opening of data access interfaces, and the encoding of the semantics of the data extend the current human-centric Web. Now, the Semantic Web c- munity is tackling the challenges of how to create and manage Semantic Web content, how to make Semantic Web applications robust and scalable, and how to organize and integrate information from di?erent sources for novel uses. To foster the exchange of ideas and collaboration, the International Semantic Web Conference brings together researchers and practitioners in relevant disciplines such as arti?cial intelligence, databases, social networks, distributed computing, Web engineering, information systems, natural language processing, soft c- puting, and human–computer interaction. This volume contains the main proceedings of ISWC 2008, which we are - cited to o?er to the growing community of researchers and practitioners of the Semantic Web. We got a tremendous response to our call for research papers from a truly international community of researchers and practitioners from 41 countries submitting 261 papers. Each paper receivedan averageof 3.