Legal Ontologies: The Linguistic Perspective

The chapter approaches the linguistic dimension of legal ontologies and its interaction with formal models of legal concepts. The authors put a strong emphasis on the importance of textual sources of the law, which determines the relevance of bottom-up approaches for legal ontology engineering. Ontology learning techniques are considered to be the most effective approach for bridging the gap between dogmatic conceptual constructions and lexical structures in legal sources. Besides the distinction between lexical meaning and conceptual meaning the authors address the challenge of embedding both meanings into modular architectures for legal knowledge representation.