DALOS DrAfting Legislation with Ontology-based Support E. Francesconi, D. Tiscornia CNR-ITTIG Istituto di Teoria e Tecniche dell’Informazione Giuridica Florence, Italy eParticipation 2006/1 – Negotiation meeting Brussels – November 29th, 2006 CNR-ITTIG

DALOS DrAfting Legislation with Ontology-based Support The goal –to improve the quality of legislative language; –to facilitate access to legislation by legal experts and citizens. The service –a linguistic and knowledge management tool to be used in the legislative processes, in particular in the phase of legislative drafting.

DALOS DrAfting Legislation with Ontology-based Support Benefits –For law-makers ability to use the more appropriate words, and to produce a text corresponding to the intention providing the tool the precise meaning of every legal term In a multilingual environment, coherence maintenance among the different linguistic versions of the same text a shared understanding of multilingual legal terminology during the discussion concerning legislative proposals –For citizens a more precise retrieval of relevant legal documents Enhance accessibility of legal documents

The methodology An ontology-based legal lexicon will ensure coherence, interoperability and harmonization of legislation The ‘ontological characterisation of legal language’ allows –explicit representation of the conceptual meaning of the lexical units –connection with other terms

Main Objectives Providing drafters with –easy access to the pertinent ontological resources –navigation through the network of relevant legal terms Enriching linguistic-ontological resources –via interaction with legal experts directly involved in the law making process –via the integration of ontology learning tools Integrating ontological tools within the legislative process for different purposes –Drafting for lexical controls (direct goal); –Indexing, retrieval of legilation (indirect goal);

Existing prototypes/tools/services xmLegesEditor: a legislative drafting tool developed, owned/provided and maintained by CNR- ITTIG MetaLex General Purpose Editor (GPE): Owned/provided and maintained by the Leibniz Center for Law – UvA T2K: a terminology extractor and ontology learning tool jointly developed by CNR-ILC and University of Pisa which combines linguistic and statistical techniques. GATE (General Architecture for Text Engineering): a tool to support advanced language analysis, data visualisation,and information sharing in many languages, owned/provided and maintained by the Department of Computer Science of the University of Sheffield The Legal Wordnet ( concepts in six European languages) produced within the LOIS project LoisWN: It is a service run by CELI resulting from the LOIS project. It is a web based production platform for browsing and editing legal wordnet resources in a multiuser multilingual context.

Additional outcomes To support the legislative debate, and democratic participation, as well debates concerning the interpretation and implementation of legislative rules To provide a lexical resource to implement a metadata model (complementary to the SEAL project) To support the transfer of European Directives into national laws.

The Consortium: Technical/Academic Partners The Italian National Research Council: –Institute of Legal Information Theory and Techniques (ITTIG-CNR) –Istituto di linguistica Computazionale (CNR-ILC) Department of Computer Science - University of Sheffield (USFD) The Leibniz Center for Law – University of Amsterdam (UvA) CELI

The Consortium: Academic Partners European University Institute (EUI) Institute of Law and Technology, Univ. Barcelona (IDT-UAB) Leiden University (UNI-LEIDEN)

The Consortium: Institutional Partners Italian Parliament –“Camera dei Deputati” (CAMERA) –“Senato della Repubblica” (SENATO) Centro Nazionale per l’Informatica nella Pubblica Amministrazione (CNIPA) Further institutional bodies will be involved for the test of the service in: –Italy (local PAs) –The Netherlands –Spain

General description and milestones Selection of the domain/s of interest at European level for which implementing the linguistic-ontological resource to be used for legislative drafting Definition of the linguistic-ontological resource organization (KOS) and design of the prototype of the system Implementation of methodologies to develop and upgrade the linguistic-ontological resource to be used in the project Implementation of the prototype of linguistic-ontological legislative drafting integrated system Test of the system prototype.

General description and milestones WP1: Management and coordination WP2: Analysis and specification of the system WP3: Text-to-Knowledge Extraction and Connection to the Ontology WP4: Implementation of prototypical services WP5: Test and Evaluation WP6: Dissemination and Exploitation

Comments included in ESR 2. Implementation Potential … “Although the proposal is complete in terms of operational and institutional requirements, it was felt that the project could benefit from a stronger institutional involvement, the majority of the partners being academical institutes.” Further institutional bodies will be involved for the test of the service in: –Italy (local PAs) –The Netherlands –Spain

Comments included in ESR 3. Contribution to relevant policies – including EU policies …“Security and privacy issues are addressed. Although Open Source Software is mentioned it is not clear how it will be used.” Issue addressed in section “G.1. Results viability” –Software developed according to an open-source license –This guarantees the possibility for the commercial company derived from the project to implement added-value and customisable services to the public administrations and institutional bodies which will use the service. –This possibility will allow to adapt and test the service in different domains, as the domains of case-law drafting or contracts drafting;

Comments included in ESR 4. Planning …“ Management is effective, although in the risk the management plan would have gained in quality if potential risks had been identified.” Issue addressed in section “F.5. Quality control and risk assessment” –General risks Critical relationships between tasks and deliverables in the project will be closely monitored and reported formally to the Commission; Project Director will be in charge of overseeing the work of all workpackages; Each workpackage, task and project results will be under the responsibility of a single partner –Specific risks Potential risks can be identified in possible skills overlapping among project partners.

Addressing identified specific risks Competences of technical partners have been specifically identified and distributed: –WP3 - “Text-to-Knowledge Extraction and Connection to the Ontology” addressed to define, implement and test methodologies (learning tools) for the linguistic- ontological resource development to be used in the project; –WP4 – “Implementation of prototypical services” addressed to implement the prototype of the system on the basis of the outcomes of WP3; Possible source of conflicts –Activities of WP3 and WP4 will handle the same linguistic-ontological resource whose knowledge organization system (KOS) will be defined within WP2; How it is faced –The leader of WP2 is CNR-ITTIG, a third party in this possible source of conflicts; –The leading staff of CNR-ITTIG forms the PMB of the project, specifically devoted to conflict resolutions within the project itself.

Comments included in ESR 4. Planning …“The dissemination could be improved by bringing it together in one work package.” Issue addressed in WP6 and also described in section “G.2. Dissemination ” –Web-based dissemination for general purposes Web site launch and maintenance; –Academic and institutional dissemination Participation to conferences and workshop; Publishing papers and preparing slides for presentations; Meeting with institutional bodies and potential end users; –Technical dissemination Meetings and activities for involvement of public administration system integrators in using the DALOS services in PA information systems; –PR through mass media Prepare PR destined for highlighting news & achievements of the project to the interested actors

Comments included in ESR 5. Use of resources “It is felt that the financial package is appropriate, although the allocation of resources is not entirely balanced.” Resources have been allocated to: –Technical partners: to develop the service; –Academic partners: to define and validate a legal lexicon; –Institutional partners: to provide specification and to test the system;

Definition of specific success criteria Quality of the legislative texts produced by using the project service –by including linguistic-ontological resources in the legislative drafting process –instruments and methodologies for evaluating the quality of the legislative texts will be identified; Accessibility to legislative texts by legal experts, decision-makers as well as citizens, thus promoting their participation in the legislative process –by including linguistic-ontological resources for a higher quality retrieval of legislation on the Internet Usability of the service;

Definition of institutional satisfaction criteria The service will be tested and validated by Institutional partners as: –The Italian Parliament (Chamber of Deputies, Senate of the Republic); –CNIPA; –Other PAs in Italy, The Netherlands and Spain; Test and validation will be undertaken under WP5;

Project milestones Selection of the domain/s of interest at European level for which implementing the linguistic-ontological resource to be used for legislative drafting Definition of the linguistic-ontological resource organization (KOS) and design of the prototype of the system Implementation of methodologies to develop and upgrade the linguistic-ontological resource to be used in the project Implementation of the prototype of linguistic-ontological legislative drafting integrated system Test of the system prototype.

Measurable outputs Instruments and methodologies for evaluating the quality of the legislative texts will be defined within WP5 - “Test and Evaluation” Survey on legislation quality indicators based on: –Evaluation check lists used by EU countries (law quality indicators); –Italian regulation about evaluation system “Direttiva del Presidente del Consiglio dei Ministri del 27 marzo 2000” “Analisi d'Impatto della regolamentazione” (Regulatory Impact Analysis (RIA); Define the common quality indicators for legislative texts for the EU countries; Establish the test modalities and the parameters for the evaluation; Test and validation of the service.

Liaison with EU institutions The service can be used –to transfer European Directives into national laws; –to harmonize at European level concepts and related terminology of specific national legislations; –as a source for coherent EU documents indexing. With respect to IATE and Eurovoc, DALOS lexicon will be enriched with –hierarchical and synonymy relations; –(near) equivalence and part-of relations; –other WordNet semantic relations.

Liaison with EU institutions Preferential EU institutions where to present the technical results of the project –The “Office for the Official Publications of the European Union” (OPOCE) For indexing, search and retrieval of EU documents; –The “Office of Translation of the European Union” To help harmonization of legal translations.