Semantic Model for Legal Resources: Annotation and Reasoning over Normative Provisions

A Semantic Web approach for an advanced access to legislative documents is presented in terms of a model of normative provisions and related axioms. In particular, relations between provisions are identified and modeled by introducing patterns able to describe Hohfeldian legal fundamental relations. Moreover, a query-based approach able to deal with relations between provision specific instances is described. Examples of semantic annotation of legal textual resources using RDF/OWL standards, as well as advanced access and reasoning facilities over provisions using SPARQL, are shown. The main benefit of the approach is represented by the ability to keep the complexity of the problem within a description logic computational tractability.