CALL FOR PAPERS - LeDA-SWAn 2015

2015 International Workshop on Legal Domain And Semantic Web Applications (LeDA-SWAn 2015) 
http://cs.unibo.it/ledaswan2015 

held during the 12th Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2015) 
June 1, 2015, Portoroz, Slovenia 

The two research areas of Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, and the Semantic Web are very much interconnected. The legal domain is an ideal field of study for Semantic Web researchers, as it uses and contributes to most of the topics that are relevant to the community. Given the complex interactions of legal actors, legal sources and legal processes, as well as the relevance and potential impact of decisions in the juridical and social processes of a country, it provides a challenging context and an important opportunity for groundbreaking research results. At the same time, Semantic Web formalisms and technologies provide a set of technical instruments which can be fruitfully adopted by legal experts to represent, interlink, and reason over legal knowledge and related aspects such as provenance, privacy, and trust. In particular, Semantic Web technology facilitates standards-based legal knowledge representation, which enables the possibility of legal information reuse over the Web. 

Ontologies, knowledge extraction and reasoning techniques have been studied by the Artificial Intelligence & Law community for years, but only few and sparse connections with the Semantic Web community have resulted from these interactions. The aim of this workshop is to study the challenges that the legal domain poses to Semantic Web research, and how Semantic Web technologies and formalisms can contribute to address these open issues. This way, we pro- mote the use of legal knowledge for addressing Semantic Web research questions and, vice versa, to use Semantic Web technologies as tools for reasoning over legal knowledge. In particular, the workshop will look for original, high quality contributions that explore the following topics (but not limited to): 
- Modeling access policies to Semantic Web datasets 
- Semantic Web and online dispute resolution and mediation 
- Semantic sensor networks in lawsuits, crisis mapping, emergencies and stand-by forces 
- Semantic Web techniques and e-discovery in large legal document collections 
- Semantic Web technologies and opinion collection and analysis 
- Legal content and knowledge in the Linked Data 
- Knowledge acquisition and concept representation on annotations and legal texts 
- Legal ontology process and management 
- Legal reasoning and query in the Semantic Web 
- Scalability issues in representing law and legal texts 
- Analysis of provenance information to detect violations of norms/policies 
- Expressive vs. lightweight representations of legal content 
- Core and domain ontologies in the legal domain 
- Theories, design patterns and ontologies in legal argumentation 
- Time and legal content representation (texts, concepts, norms) 
- OWL approaches to reasoning and legal knowledge 
- Linking legal content to external resources 
- Provenance, trust and metadata for authoritative sources 
- SPARQL queries on large legal datasets 
- Legal knowledge extraction using NLP and ontologies 
- User-friendly applications and interface design to interact with legal semantic information 
- Publishing/reusing legal-related content in Linked Data 
- Rules and Automated Reasoning in the Semantic Web 
- Semantic Web technologies and Legal Scholarly Publishing 
- Law, Intellectual property and legal issues for data and schemas 
- Licenses for Linked Open Data 
- Information ethics and the Semantic Web 


Workshop Chairs: 
Silvio Peroni, University of Bologna (Italy) 
Serena Villata, Inria Sophia Antipolis (France) 

Important dates: 
- March 6, 2015: Paper submission deadline (23:59 Hawaii time) 
- April 3, 2015: Author notification 
- April 17, 2015: Camera-ready copies due 
- June 1, 2015 (afternoon): Workshop 

Submission instructions: 
All papers must represent original and unpublished work that is not currently under review. 
Papers will be evaluated according to their significance, originality, technical content, style, 
clarity, and relevance to the workshop. We welcome the following types of contributions: 
- Full research papers (up to 12 pages) 
- Short research papers (up to 6 pages) 
- Poster papers (up to 4 pages) 
- Demo papers (up to 4 pages) 

All submissions must be written in English and formatted according to LNCS instructions for authors: 
http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6-793341-0 

Papers are to be submitted through the Easychair Conference Management System: 
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ledaswan2015 

Publication opportunity: 
We are planning to publish the full conference proceedings as part of the CEUR Workshop Proceedings. 
In addition, relevant submissions will be considered for a further book publication.