A Legal Document Ontology: The Missing Layer in Legal Document Modelling

This paper presents a mechanism for adding meaningful semantics on top of the CEN Metalex standard, so as to allow the management of heterogeneous legal resources. The results—developed within the Estrella project —envisage the possibility of using CEN Metalex as a neutral document standard in many situations where legal information resources are involved: as an intermediate data format for fostering long-term preservation of legal documents, as a tool for interoperability between legacy systems, as an interchange data format between different application layers, as a conversion mechanism across different versions of the same standard. CEN Metalex also makes it possible to build interesting CMS applications for heterogeneous legal resource information. In order to exploit these potentialities, CEN Metalex needs to be enriched with a legal document ontology and with an intermediate layer called LMIF designed to add semantics to the general structural layer. This paper explains how CEN Metalex can be enriched using LMIF and how to connect this layer with an abstract legal document ontology.