Legal Knowledge Modeling for Managing Legislation in the Semantic Web

Regulation quality and accessibility are essential requirements to guarantee a transparent policy making framework, thus promoting democracy, certainty of rights and participation of citizens in the decision-making process. In particular European Union policies about eGovernment call for high level Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) solutions for promoting a more transparent, participatory and accountable decision-making process. Legal knowledge modeling can represent a pre-condition for meeting such requirements; at the same time the Semantic Web can provide the background of principles and tools allowing the implementation of advanced legislative drafting processes in mono and multilingual domains, as well as retrieval and reasoning services on legislation. This paper will investigate such issues according to semantic and logic profiles of legal texts, as well as possible technical implementations of such services.