Bridging the gap between Legal Practitioners and Knowledge Engineers using semi-formal KR

The use of Structured English as a computation independent knowledge representation format for non-technical users in business rules representation has been proposed in OMG’s Semantics and Business Vocabulary Representation (SBVR). In the legal domain we face a similar problem. Formal representation languages, such as OASIS’ LegalRuleML and legal ontologies (LKIF, legal OWL2 ontologies etc.) support the technical knowledge engineer and the automated reasoning. But, they can be hardly used directly by the legal domain experts who do not have a computer science background. In this paper we adapt the SBVR Structured English approach for the legal domain and implement a proof-of-concept, called KR4IPLaw, which enables legal domain experts to represent their knowledge in Structured English in a computational independent and hence, for them, more usable way. The benefit of this approach is that the underlying pre-defined semantics of the Structured English approach makes transformations into formal languages such as OASIS LegalRuleML and OWL2 ontologies possible. We exemplify our approach in the domain of patent law.