2014 International Workshop on Semantic Web for the Law

http://cs.unibo.it/sw4law2014

co-located with the 27th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems (JURIX 2014)
10 December 2014, Krakow, Poland

** Deadline extension for paper submission:
** November 2, 2014, 23:59 Central European Time (CET)

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 like Linked (Open) Data 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 promote 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):

• Semantic Web and online dispute resolution and mediation
• Law and Regulations patterns of Social Web communities
• Semantic Web techniques and e-discovery in large legal document collections
• Legal content and knowledge in Linked (Open) Data
• Knowledge acquisition and concept representation on annotations and legal texts
• 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
• Linking legal content to external resources
• Provenance, trust and metadata for authoritative sources
• Legal knowledge extraction using NLP and ontologies
• Publishing/reusing legal-related content in Linked (Open) Data
• Rules and Automated Reasoning in the Semantic Web
• Access to legal information and visualization
• Rights and licenses for data and semantics
• Law, Intellectual property and legal issues for data and schemas
• Information ethics and the Semantic Web
• Law and governance in deliberative democracy and democratic participation
• Normative Multi-agent Systems and the Semantic Web

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

Important dates:
- November 2, 2014: Paper submission deadline (23:59 Central European Time, CET) [SHARP]
- November 11, 2014: Author notification
- November 12, 2014: Early bird registration deadline for JURIX
- November 20, 2014: Camera-ready copies due
- December 10, 2014: 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=sw4law2014

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 journal publication.