By Dr. Adam Z. Wyner

Law.com

Legal knowledge is largely expressed in written language, and legal professionals read and write to access, process and reason with the knowledge in texts. Although one can use information extraction to process text on a computer, the text remains a meaningless string of characters to the machine, without more — such as the Semantic Web.

The Semantic Web, an extension of the current World Wide Web, promises to make Web-based documents meaningful to both people and computers by changing how legal knowledge is represented, managed and reasoned with. This article focuses on ontologies, which are one of the means to complete the Semantic Web’s design. It introduces some of the broad concepts of ontologies, indicates some of the sources of further information and tools, then provides a brief example of a legal ontology.

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