A knowledge representation for Vietnamese legal document system

Legal documents play an important role in the legal systems of every nation. In order to process information automatically and make use of knowledge from legal documents, we need an appropriate knowledge representation for them. In this research, we investigate properties of the Vietnamese legal document system and propose a representation for the documents and their interrelationships. The main challenges for this task are their unstability, limited validity period and complicated interrelationships. Properties and relationships which we design to represent in our knowlege base are selective in order to make use of information within legal documents. In order to represent our knowlege base, we compare three methods: Semantic Network, Production Rules, Frame Language and make use of their advantages in our representation. Moreover, we implement a service-oriented system providing knowledge querying service for other application systems based on our research result.