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 – Kick-off meeting Brussels – February 5th, 2007

Overview Objectives of the project; Technical contents and activities; Political and institutional contacts; Dissemination activities; Impact and benefits of this action.

Objectives The goal –to improve the quality of legislative language; –to facilitate legal experts and citizens in accessing legislation The service –a linguistic and knowledge management tool to be used in the legislative processes, in particular in the phase of legislative drafting.

Outcomes Providing legislative drafters with –easy access to the pertinent ontological resources –navigation through the network of relevant legal terms Integrating ontological tools within the legislative process for different purposes –Lexical controls in the drafting activities (direct goal) –Indexing, retrieval of legislation (indirect goal)

Technical contents: the methodology An ontology-based legal lexicon will be: –developed to ensure coherence, interoperability and harmonization of legislation –Integrated within the legislative drafting process The ‘ontological characterisation of the legal language’ allows –explicit representation of the conceptual meaning of the lexical units –connection with other terms

Technical contents: activities  Selection of the domain/s of interest at European level (contacts with LEX-IS)  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 the linguistic-ontological component within a legislative drafting system  Test of the system prototype.

Technical contents: Implementation of the service Starting point: –The linguistic-ontological resources available from the LOIS project (eContent Program - EDC-22161) LOIS database: a multi-lingual thesaurus to guarantee cross lingual access to European legislation and other legal documents (such as court cases); Six languages: Italian, English, German, Czech, Portuguese and Dutch. Enriching linguistic-ontological resources –via the integration of ontology learning tools –via interaction with legal experts directly involved in the law making process Integration of the linguistic-ontological resources into a legislative drafting integrated system (SEAL)

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 in testing the service in: –Italy (local PAs) –The Netherlands –Spain

General tasks allocation 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;

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

Activities: Definition of specific success criteria Quality of the legislative texts produced by using the project service –Instruments and methodologies for evaluating the quality of the legislative texts will be defined within WP5 - “Test and Evaluation” Accessibility of legislative texts by legal experts, decision-makers as well as citizens, thus promoting their participation in the legislative process ( via the LEXIPATION platform and supporting the LEGESE service) Usability of the drafting service;

Activities: 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;

Dissemination activities Dissemination activities Addressed in WP6 –Web-based dissemination for general purposes Web site launch and maintenance; –Academic and institutional dissemination Participation in conferences and workshops: (E-Challenges, Ai&Law Conference, Jurix Conference, ITCongress2008); Publishing papers and preparing slides for presentations; Meeting with institutional bodies and potential end users; –Technical dissemination Meetings and activities to involve public administration system integrators in using the DALOS services in PA information systems; –PR through mass media PR aimed at highlighting news & achievements of the project

Impact and benefits of the action 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 To support the transfer of European Directives into national laws.

Impact and benefits of the action For law-makers ability to use the more appropriate words, and to produce a text corresponding to the intention of the legislator in a multilingual environment, coherence maintenance among the different linguistic versions of the same text shared understanding of multilingual legal terminology during the discussion concerning legislative proposals For citizens a more precise retrieval of relevant legal documents to enhance accessibility of legal documents

Joined-up technical activities The main cooperative task is to make the lexical resources accessible within the ITTIG Legislative editor “xmLegesEditor” that will be tested in SEAL; The testing activities of the pilots developed within the DALOS and SEAL projects will be coordinated to avoid useless duplications. Further common activities can be forseen between DALOS and LEX-IS as regards managing complex legislation –By using xmLegesEditor; –By harmonising and using the linguistic ontological resources developed within DALOS and LEX-IS for legal texts sematic annotation Multimedia platforms of LEGESE, LexiPation and TID+ could be used for documents management and communications among projects

Joined-up organisation activities Part of the meetings will be jointly organised between DALOS and SEAL to exchange results and to make necessary adjustments in the follow-up; A joint mid-term meeting among all the eParticipation project is desirable –to evaluate the progress of the activities –to plan further common actions depending on mid-term results

Joined-up dissemination actvities Common activities in the dissemination and exploitation process –participation in conferences and workshops –Joint test of the pilots and presentation of the results to public institutions; (A common presentation will enhance understanding of the pilots potentialities and will set grounds for future cooperation). Organisation of a workshop including all the eParticipation projects as well as political and institutional bodies involved in legislative process;

Liaison with EU institutions The service can be used –to implement European Directives into national legal systems; –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.