Legal Rules Modelling Meets the Web

This abstract presents RAWE, a Web editor for helping the legal knowledge engineer marking up legal document’s using the Akoma Ntoso [2][13] XML standard, and also to model legal rules using a logic formalism and convert them into LegalRuleML [1][11]. The main goal of the RAWE Web editor is to provide a tool capable of managing in an integrated way the legal source text and the legal rules. It offers the advantages of the Akoma Ntoso and of LegalRuleML, applying the isomorphism principle [3][6][10] to connect, as far as possible, legally binding textual provisions with the logic formalism expressed using rules. AI&Law tools [8] usually are too focused on the task of applying a logic formalism to achieve isomorphism (e.g. often they use plain text, paraphrase techniques or simplified English text—ACE 1 ), but the legal experts (judges, lawyers, and administrators) are interested in verifying the results of the legal reasoning engine and in finding evidence in the legally binding text that more and more, nowadays, is available on the web in digital format 2 . Secondly, a legal text changes over time, and so the rules need to be updated accordingly. If the isomorphism principle is not applied properly, it is quite difficult to determine whether those rules need to be updated [12]. The RAWE editor helps the legal knowledge engineers to maintain text and rules aligned and to minimize manual mark-up activity during the lifecycle of the legal documentation. Thirdly, the aim of the RAWE is also to meet the Semantic Web techniques, for so it converts all the legal knowledge embedded in Akoma Ntoso and in LegalRuleML in RDF serialization to favour Linked Open Data interoperability with other legal open resources available in the cloud (e.g. geoNames 3 , organizations 4 , crowd-sourcing annotation, journalism, etc.).