In the last few years both AI approaches and ontological models have been successfully applied in the legal domain, to address aspects such as legal reasoning, semantic and cross-language information retrieval, document classification and legal drafting.
In particular, bottom-up AI techniques and top-down ontological methodologies have been combined tackling difficult legal problems. For instance, machine learning techniques are successfully applied to extract organized knowledge from legal texts which can be than connected to a top level ontology, also with the help of Natural Language Processing techniques,.
More generally, as AI techniques are more extensively used in the legal domain becomes clearer that their performances can be enhanced by providing structured legal knowledge, organized into ontologies at various levels of specificity and formality.
On the other hand legal ontologies can support legal inference and communication: ontologies provide the processes of legal reasoning, negotiation and argumentation with shared vocabularies or (formal) conceptualizations of legal domains, possibly in terms of common sense notions as already formalized in existing foundational ontologies.

The LOAIT workshop aims at addressing the interface between AI and ontologies in the legal domain, with regard both to theories and implementations. The workshop will constitute a valuable opportunity for researchers and practitioners in AI, AI&Law, Legal Ontologies and related fields to discuss problems, exchange information and compare perspectives.

The first edition of the LOAIT Workshop, held in conjunction with ICAIL 05, provided was indeed such an opportunity, as shown by the encouraging statistics: 19 submissions; 10 long papers plus 4 short ones selected for presentation and publication on a book of proceedings; 35 attendees; more than an hour of in-depth discussion concluding the event.

These figures point at an increasing interest of the larger AI&Law community in the study and the use of Legal Ontologies, which provides the motivation for organising a second edition of the workshop still in conjunction with ICAIL.

For this second edition of the Workshop authors are invited to submit papers describing original completed work, work in progress, interesting problems, use cases or research trends related to one or more of the topics of interest listed below. Submitted papers will be refereed by two experts based on originality, significance and technical soundness.