Ontological model of legal norms for creating and using legislation

Abstract

This paper presents a formal model of legal norms modeled in OWL. It is intended for semiautomatic drafting and semantic retrieval and browsing of legislation. Most existing solutions model legal norms using formal logic, rules or ontologies. Nevertheless, they were not intended as a basis for drafting, retrieval and browsing of legislation. The proposed model formally defines legal norms using their elements and elements of legal relations they regulate. The duality between the content and the form of legislation is exploited by connecting it to the XML model of legislation based on the CEN MetaLex specification. Those models are verified by applying them to the norms contained in an existing piece of legislation and by developing a prototype application for semantic browsing of legislation that is based on the models.