Modeling Legal Documents as Typed Linked Data for Relational Querying

Access to legal knowledge is particularly challenging to information retrieval systems. Not only is legal knowledge usually expressed in linguistically complex forms, but it is also structurally sophisticated (e.g pieces of legislation applicable to a case, version in force of a legal document, other related sources). Modeling the collection of documents in such complex domains requires taking into account the semantic content of the documents as well as their relational structure since documents are usually related to each other by various types of links. In this paper we describe two approaches for modeling and querying a collection of interlinked legal documents. The first approach is based on Formal Concept Analysis and Relational Concept Analysis to model and query the collection of documents. The second approach uses semantic web techniques (RDF, OWL and SPARQL). Different types of relational queries are discussed.