Legal ontology of sales law application to ecommerce

Legal codes, such as the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) examined in this article, are good points of entry for AI and ontology work because of their more straightforward adaptability to relationship linking and rules-based encoding. However, approaches relying on encoding solely on formal code structure are incomplete, missing the rich experience of practitioner expertise that identifies key relationships and decision criteria often supplied by experienced practitioners and process experts from various disciplines (e.g., sociology, political economics, logistics, operations research). This research focuses on the UCC because it transcends the limitations of a formal code, functioning essentially as a composite. AI work can benefit from real-world codes like the UCC, which are essentially formal codes enlightened from a more realistic experience-base from centuries of development in international commercial transactions settings. This paper then describes our initial work in converting an expert system on the U.S. law governing the sale of goods from Article II of the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC), into a knowledge-based system using the Web Ontology Language OWL.

[1]  Michael Aikenhead,et al.  The Uses and Abuses of Neural Networks in Law , 1996 .

[2]  Kathryn B. Laskey,et al.  Computational Inference for Evidential Reasoning in Support of Judicial Proof , 2002 .

[3]  Stefan Decker,et al.  Creating Semantic Web Contents with Protégé-2000 , 2001, IEEE Intell. Syst..

[4]  James A. Hendler,et al.  The Semantic Web" in Scientific American , 2001 .

[5]  Davide Grossi,et al.  Responsibilities in organizations , 2006 .

[6]  Henrik Eriksson,et al.  Using JessTab to Integrate Protégé and Jess , 2003, IEEE Intell. Syst..

[7]  G. Boella.  The Ontological Properties of Social Roles : Definitional Dependence , Powers and Roles Playing Roles , 2005 .

[8]  Maurits Barendrecht,et al.  Fitting the Forum to the Fuss with Sticky Defaults: Failure on the Market for Dispute Resolution Services? , 2004 .

[9]  Carlo Biagioli,et al.  Model and ontology based conceptual searching in legislative XML collections , 1997 .

[10]  A MusenMark,et al.  Creating Semantic Web Contents with Protégé-2000 , 2001 .

[11]  Sylvie Szulman,et al.  Merging of legal micro-ontologies from European directives , 2007, Artificial Intelligence and Law.

[12]  T. M. van Engers,et al.  Normative statements on the semantic web. , 2005 .

[13]  Edwina L. Rissland,et al.  Artificial Intelligence and Law: Stepping Stones to a Model of Legal Reasoning , 1990 .

[14]  Carole D. Hafner.  Conceptual organization of case law knowledge bases , 1987, ICAIL '87.

[15]  Benjamin N. Grosof,et al.  SweetDeal : Represen with Exceptions using and Process , 2003 .

[16]  Wim Peters,et al.  The structuring of legal knowledge in LOIS , 2007, Artificial Intelligence and Law.

[17]  P. Libby.  The Scientific American , 1881, Nature.

[18]  Erich Schweighofer,et al.  Advanced lexical ontologies and hybrid knowledge based systems: First steps to a dynamic legal electronic commentary , 2007, Artificial Intelligence and Law.

[19]  Pompeu Casanovas,et al.  OPJK modeling methodology , 2005 .

[20]  Paul Johannesson,et al.  Semantic Representation of Contract Knowledge using Multi Tier Ontology , 2003, SWDB.

[21]  John Zeleznikow,et al.  Representations of Decision-making Support in Negotiation , 2001, J. Decis. Syst..

[22]  Paul Todd,et al.  E-Commerce Law , 2005 .

[23]  Sandip Debnath,et al.  LawBot: A Multiagent Assistant for Legal Research , 2000, IEEE Internet Comput..

[24]  Richard A. Posner,et al.  The Jurisprudence of Skepticism , 1988 .

[25]  H. Brown,et al.  Adr: Principles and Practice , 1993 .

[26]  Takahira Yamaguchi,et al.  LODE : A Legal Ontology Development Environment , 1998 .

[27]  Jaspreet Shaheed.  A Top-Level Language-Biased Legal Ontology , 2005 .

[28]  P. Gray.  Ontology and Epistemology in Legal Knowledge Engineering , 2005 .

[29]  John W. Bagby.  e-Commerce Law: Issues for Business , 2002 .