KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION FOR LEGAL APPLICATIONS

Publisher Summary This chapter describes the factors that need to be taken into account when choosing how to carry out the knowledge representation for a legal KBS. The chapter presents a distinction between two aspects: expressiveness and engineering principles. The first concerns what can be built, and the second concerns how it should be built. The first determines what can be represented in formalism: the formalism of the Toolkit is, for example, inadequate in its treatment of time and modal knowledge. Given this inadequacy, applications can still be built, but their functionality would be limited. Thus, in the policy application, all the distinctively modal reasoning should be performed by the user, although he is supported in this by the non-modal reasoning of the system. The legal domain does make certain demands on the expressiveness of a representation, and the nature of the application to be built would depend on how well these demands are met.