Progetto di ricerca: LOIS (Lexical Ontologies for Legal Information Society)
Materiali

The Workplan

The initial resource for the project is a Legal Wordnet for Italian which has been developed by ITTG. (link a JurWordnet The goal of LOIS is to localize such a legally oriented Wordnet into a number of European languages. Such a number (6 languages, namely Italian, English, German, Dutch, Portuguese an Czech) is big enough to create a European level strategic impact, and to allow the affirmation of the paradigm as a standard for accessing legal resources.

According to the strategy described, for instance in Vossen & al. 1999, as well as in several deliverables of the EuroWordnet project, localization will be carried out in such a way to keep cross lingual relationship between different synsets. In this way LOIS will contribute to the creation of a set of European Legal Wordnets, where lexical items can be mapped from language to language according to their semantic meaning, at least as far as we can consider the structure of Wordnet as semantically oriented (cf. Fellbaum 1998).

LOIS-1 will define a set of preparatory actions in order to make the successful deployment of the LOIS project possible. It will deliver both strategic documents and software prototypes. The two types of deliverables will be harmonized in order to gain consensus among external interested parties and to prove market exploitability already at an early stage. With the results of LOIS-1, the consortium believes to be able to have the necessary tools for correctly addressing all subsequent marketing initiatives and for orienting successive technical works towards full success.

In terms of deliverables, the LOIS-1 phase has the following objectives:

• A business plan which factually proves how public organizations and private companies can take economical benefit from the presence of localized legal Wordnets. The business plan will also consider benefits from the point of view of the citizen in terms of bigger accessibility to legislation, thus increased awareness.
• A detailed work plan defining both methodologies, work flows, and phases for a localization project aiming at producing the resources at the base of LOIS. The work plan will have a top down structure, with increased granularity, starting from defining cycles, up to the definition of the workbench environment for people localizing legal Wordnet.
• A Fragment of localized Wordnet (about 500 synsets or concepts) in all the involved languages (Czech, Portuguese, English, Dutch and German). The production contexts of such a fragment must mirror the conditions prescribed in the detailed work plan, so that it can serve as a practical validation of it.
• A prototype information retrieval application based on the localized fragment. Such a prototype will have to demonstrate both cross-lingual retrieval and retrieval of legal document by inexperienced people. European commission has indeed recognized the importance of having linked WordNets for all European languages already in 1996 by funding the EuroWordnet project (LE-2 4003 & LE-4 8328 ). The results and the methodologies developed inside such a project proved to be so sound that in September 2001 a new project was launched, namely Balkanet, with the goal of extending EuroWordNet to Balkan languages.