A Time-aware Ontology for Legal Resources

This paper presents a new approach to associating metadata to legal documents by exploiting a fully developed information ontology of legal resources that takes time into account. Our information ontology is technically an application of the FRBROO model to organization of legal documents. Our contribution clarifies not only the diachronic evolution of the legal resources in time, but it also puts the theoretical grounding for the modelling of the relationships between the different entities participating to the legislative process workflow (e.g. bills, amendments). Our model is also applicable to all artefacts of the publishing process. Moreover the time dimension can be used to support successful interconnections between different legal resources (e.g. between normative acts and case-law) that need precise point-in-time referencing.