ALLOT: A Light Legal Ontology on TLCs

ALLOT (A Light Legal Ontology On TLCs, https://w3id.org/akn/ontology/allot) implements the Akoma Ntoso Top Level Classes (TLCs) as a formal OWL 2 DL ontology, so as to model in detail the documental and non-documental references (i.e. any entity, people, events, roles, etc.) present in Akoma Ntoso documents with the main purpose of linking together datasets based, potentially, on different ontologies.

ALLOT formalizes the Akoma Ntoso TLCs in a set of OWL classes following the Akoma Ntoso guidelines and best practices. It has been recently aligned with two important foundational ontologies, i.e. the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) and the Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering (DOLCE). This alignment is crucial since it enables a reusability of the model in different contexts and domains (e.g. BFO is already used in several models adopted by the United Nations), and it also provides a methodological organization of all the TLCs and their relations.

The adoption of ALLOT as starting point for the development of UNDO is crucial for guaranteeing the best interoperability with Akoma Ntoso documents. In fact, it provides a collection of IRIs for all the TLCs explicitly referenced in Akoma Ntoso, and it organizes them hierarchically so as to provide an intuitive meaning (guided by the foundational ontologies imported) and, thus, to guide their use in Akoma Ntoso documents. In addition, ALLOT can be used as guide for the future extension to UNDO, so as to make every extension compliant with the logical foundations that have been adopted within it.

All the material related to ALLOT is available on the GitHub repository at https://w3id.org/akn/repository/allot. The current version of ALLOT is actually based on a previous implementation named ALLOT Core and available at http://akn.web.cs.unibo.it/allot/core.owl. ALLOT can also be used to bridge knowledge bases extracted from Akoma Ntoso documents to knowledge bases that use other ontologies such as Metalex (http://justinian.leibnizcenter.org/MetaLex/metalex-cen.owl).

In the context of UNDO, ALLOT is used as basic ontology so as to have a model compliant with the Akoma Ntoso document specification.