New Legal Organization Announcement

New Legal Organization Pushes Semantic Web
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Legal-RDF, a new organization in the legal industry, has placed the Revised Code
of Washington and the Washington State Constitution onto the Semantic Web. This
material can be the basis for next generation Internet applications that apply
"reasoning" software against legal documents. The new organization is currently
conducting a membership drive among Washington State firms, associations, and
others who are interested in advanced technologies for the Semantic Web.

Legal-RDF is now annotating the state laws and constitution with keywords that
allow powerful tools to extract meaningful information from the legal text.
These keywords are defined in the context of ten inter-acting ontologies: Actor
& Role; Scene & Prop; Theme & Drama; Quality & Quantity; and Script &
Basic-Grammar. Its architecture refines typical OWL schemas by its choice of
predicates: they are possessive verbs (e.g., has, had, willHave, willNotHave,
etc.) and existential verbs (e.g., isA, willBeA, wasNotA, etc.). The
recently-released paper, "Tagging Legal Text (How-to)" discusses these concepts,
and is available at http://www.hypergrove.com/legalrdf.org/LegalMarkup.html,

Legal-RDF is a non-profit organization sponsored by among others the National
Center for State Courts. John McClure, its director, was previously architect
for the Data Consortium and an early member of Legal XML, both non-profit
Internet standards organizations in the legal and real estate industries. His
company, Hypergrove Engineering, specializes in Semantic Web tools for legal
contracts negotiation, management, and workflow.


Thank you!

John McClure, Director
http://www.legal-RDF.org
http://www.legal-XHTML.org

Box 2002
Port Townsend WA 98368
360-379-3838

Received on Tuesday, 7 March 2006 21:39:22 UTC