Constructing Legal Arguments with Rules in the Legal Knowledge Interchange Format (LKIF)

The Legal Knowledge Interchange Format (LKIF), being developed in the European ESTRELLA project, defines a knowledge representation language for arguments, rules, ontologies, and cases in XML. In this article, the syntax and argumentation-theoretic semantics of the LKIF rule language is presented and illustrated with an example based on German family law. This example is then applied to show how LKIF rules can be used with the Carneades argumentation system to construct, evaluate and visualize arguments about a legal case.