Context of the Book -- Law and the Semantic Web, an Introduction -- Introduction: Legal Informatics and the Conceptions of the Law -- Statistical Study of Judicial Practices -- Theoretical Papers: Legal Ontologies and Methodologies -- Use and Reuse of Legal Ontologies in Knowledge Engineering and Information Management -- Types and Roles of Legal Ontologies -- CAUSATI O NT : Modeling Causation in AI&Law -- A Constructive Framework for Legal Ontologies -- On the Ontological Status of Norms -- Building Legal Ontologies with METHONTOLOGY and WebODE -- Institutional Pragmatics and Legal Ontology Limits of the Descriptive Approach of Texts -- Practice Papers: Information Retrieval and Applications -- Using NLP Techniques to Identify Legal Ontology Components: Concepts and Relations -- A Methodology to Create Legal Ontologies in a Logic Programming Information Retrieval System -- Iuriservice: An Intelligent Frequently Asked Questions System to Assist Newly Appointed Judges -- NetCase: An Intelligent System to Assist Legal Services Providers in Transnational Legal Networks -- No Model Behaviour: Ontologies for Fraud Detection.

by Roberto Cencioni At the Lisbon Summit in March 2000, European heads of state and government set a new goal for the European Union — to become the most competitive knowled- based society in the world by 2010. As part of this objective, ICT (information and communication technologies) services should become available for every citizen, and for all schools, homes and businesses. The book you have in front of you is about Semantic Web technology and law. Law is something omnipresent; all citizens — at some points in their lives — have to deal with it. In addition, law involves a large group of professionals, and is a mul- billion business world wide. Information technology is important because it that can improve citizens’ interaction with law, as well as improve legal professionals’ work environment. Legal professionals dedicate a significant amount of their time to finding, reading, analyzing and synthesizing information in order to take decisions, and prepare advice and trials, among other tasks. As part of the “Semantic-Based Knowledge and Content Systems” Strategic Objective, the European Commission is funding projects to construct technology to make the Semantic Web vision come true. 1 The articles in this book are related to two current foci of the Strategic Objective : • Knowledge acquisition and modelling, capturing knowledge from raw information and multimedia content in webs and other distributed repositories to turn poorly structured information into machi- processable knowledge.