Epistemology and ontology in core ontologies: FOLaw and LRI-Core, two core ontologies for law

EKAW*04 Workshop on Core Ontologies in Ontology Engineering

Joost Breuker ; Rinke Hoekstra

Others  :  http://CEUR-WS.org/Vol-118/paper2.pdf
PID  :  1533

来源: CEUR

【 摘 要 】

For more than a decade constructing ontologies for legal domains, we, at the Leibniz Center forLaw, felt really the need to develop a core ontology for law that would enable us to re-use thecommon denominator of the various legal domains. In this paper we present two core ontologies forlaw. The first one was the result of a PhD thesis by [Valente, 1995], called FOLaw. FOLaw specifies functional dependencies between types of knowledge involved in legal reasoning. Despite the fact that FOLaw was the starting point for a number of ontologies and legal reasoning systems in various (European) projects, it is rather an epistemological framework than a (core) ontology. We are not the only ones who easily confound epistemology with ontology. In the paper we present some examples and discuss whether this epistemological promiscuity in (core) ontology develop- ment is a serious problem. It is to some extent, as it limits the scope of re-use (if not leading to confusion). Therefore, we started about four years ago the development of a ‘real’ core-ontology for law based upon notions of common sense. The reason for a common-sense foundation is thatdomain independent concepts of law – the common denominator – are still tainted with a strongcommon-sense flavor. Moreover, domains of law refer to social activities which are generallygoverned by common-sense notions. This core ontology, called LRI-Core, consists of five majorportions (‘worlds’): physical, mental and abstract classes; roles and occurrences.