STRUCTURE-PRESERVING REPRESENTATIONS OF COMPLEX REFERENCES

This paper presents a new formalism for isomorphic representations of legal knowledge, based on feature structures. The formalism, which follows the legal-theoretical distinctions of Van Kralingen’s (1995) conceptual modeling framework, preserves the structural composition of non-primitive concepts in the representation. We claim this is necessary when the interpretation of a non-primitive concept is partially modified by a deeming provision, because occurrences of the concept in legislation then refer both to the concept as a whole and to its component parts.