Research Project: JurWordNet, law semantic lexicon
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According to the language philosopher John Searle, creating social or political ontology means describing the nature, properties, and role of social entities. The "objects" represented by nations, social classes, communities, associations, governments, banks, universities, but also rights, obligations, powers, money, copyrights, patents, have no real existence or physical identity, but fill social life and are the object of any conversation on politics, social behaviors, and justice.

Language created them, their existence is based on international, historical, and social agreements, and their meaning changes according to the various social contexts, historical ages, and discourse levels. The role of ontology is to describe such objects making explicit the meaning assumptions in terms of minimal (meta)properties that may be universally shared.On stricter, and more technical terms, ontology defines concept meaning negotiations facilitating, especially on the Internet, communication interchange, net interactivity, use of existing lexical resources, harmonization of contents, and so on.

Legislation ontology is the subset of social object ontology, which, in turn, needs ontological assumptions on the real world, objects of social and juridical reality. Both imply, and thus depend on, foundational ontology. The foundational ontology upon which core ontology is based (Core Legal Ontology CLO) is DOLCE + (Extension of DOLCE, "Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering", version 2.1 of D17 Deliverable Wonderweb, http://wonderweb.semanticweb.org.).

DOLCE was developed by the Laboratory for Applied Ontology of the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technology of the National Research Center in Rome, collaborating with ITTIG for the development of juridical ontology.

The theoretical principles and assumptions on which ontology is based allow representing the double dimension (normative word/real word) in which the entities of the juridical world are set: in Core Legal Ontology, legislation is considered the description of the ideal way in which things should occur in the world (situations). Of course, not all behaviors interest the legislative world, not all norms refer to real situations. In the juridical dimension, the "agents", which may have physical identity or not, acquire roles: the function of norms is to regulate actions in which they are involved, thus associating legal effects to behaviors.