Legal RDF.org

Our Mission

Legal-RDF is a non-profit organization that is sponsored by legal firms, software companies, and other stakeholders interested in software tools that leverage the Semantic Web. This website, the Legal RDF Google group, and the Legal-RDF WIKIs at LEXML, support these goals:

to develop and publish domain vocabularies (that is, ontologies) used to label text within legal and related documents with their semantic meaning.
(for sponsors only) to develop and publish community resources, such as legal codes, that may be referenced by text within legal and related documents and by software tools to perform a wide variety of tasks that are not possible today.
(for sponsors only) to provide community web services for retrieving and updating community resources. Retrieval shall be possible in a number of formats, particularly the Extensible HyperText Markup Language, Version 2 (XHTML2), Really Simple Syndication (RSS), and the Resource Description Framework (RDF).
(for sponsors only) to provide community software for displaying, validating, and reconfiguring RDF and XHTML documents.
to publicize the availability of open-source and proprietary Semantic Web tools; community adoption of the Legal-RDF ontology; and whitepapers and other material important to those adopting RDF technologies for legal and related documents.

A companion web-site also sponsored by Legal-RDF, http://www.legalxhtml.org, and an associated Legal XHTML Google Group, focus on issues concerned with XHTML markup of legal and related documents. Legal-XHTML exists (a) to standardize solutions for specific problems arising from using XHTML to represent legal documents; and (b) to encourage the use of the Legal-RDF ontologies in an XHTML context.

What Is The Semantic Web?

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Community Vision

Today within the legal community, the Internet has had its greatest impact improving the process of rendering legal services by government and legal firms. The Internet provides e-mail for faster and more certain communications; electronic document filing for faster and more certain document submissions; and websites for disseminating information concerning one's legal services, one's legal and administrative staff, and one's publicly-available documents.

To date, the content of legal documents has been represented as either a simple stream of text, or as a non-interpretable PDF image. The next, inevitable, step is to identify the type and meaning of the content in legal documents, thereby exposing this information to the numerous reasoning tools emerging from the Semantic Web community. Advancing in this direction, the legal community will lower its costs; improve the quality of its services; and create an environment conducive to mass-customization of legal products.

The Semantic Web is a disruptive technology in this sense for the legal industry. Firms can grow significantly by fielding products that cater to the needs of clients who ordinarily would not pursue legal advice. Reasoning-based software offers opportunities to provide these clients a level of service with an acceptable level of risk.

Therefore the strategy of the Legal-RDF community is to construct two databases -- a comprehensive open-source ontology that is then applied in structured descriptions of statutory and administrative codes. These databases are then leveraged by the Semantic Web community to create the reasoning software envisioned for orderly industry growth.

Specifically underlying this strategy is the cognition that functional requirements that apply to many legal documents (e.g., to contracts and wills) are nearly identical to those in legal statutes. Benefits will powerfully ripple through the entire community if relevant software is applicable equally to both domains. Consequently, development of a contracts-related ontology, separate from or preceding a statutes-related ontology, is undesirable from economic, social, and legal perspectives.

The Semantic Web is also disruptive to the legal community (indeed, to the entire computing community) in that as XHTML documents are annotated with terms from the Legal-RDF vocabularies, or as a Legal-RDF represention of a non-XHTML document is created, one is essentially creating an un-structured database within the document; such a travelling database can then be queried far more precisely than conventional text-indexing software, resulting in significant benefits for document management activities within the firm. In short, "travelling databases" are certain to save firms money and time preparing legal cases, and when performing legal due diligence during economic transactions.

These two Semantic Web databases offer other intriguing possibilities. Legal-RDF's structured descriptions of legal codes can provide a foundation for software that (a) inserts links to statute citations into XHTML (and PDF and Word) documents; (b) validates the content of legal documents; and (c) compares statutes across jurisdictions. Also, the Legal-RDF ontology itself can be the basis for cost-saving automated client interviews.

Finally, the simple fact that a legal document (e.g., a contract), can use the Legal-RDF ontology to identify key text strings, means that that information can be mechanically extracted, validated, and transferred to a structured database (e.g., a contract management system), thereby saving the costs and errors associated with usual manual methods.