Jusletter IT

In this position paper we present some advantages, that the use of Ontology Design Pattern (ODP) can have for Legal Knowledge Base Engineering and also possibilities, why the widespread use of ODP in the legal domain is still lacking. Ontologies and the knowledge bases based thereon are seldom reusable and interoperable. This results in most ontologies being built from scratch, which in turn increases the cost of ontology engineering. This can be remedied by the increased use of ODP in ontology engineering. ODP are modelling solutions to solve recurrent ontology development problems. The increased use of ODP would increase the reusability and interoperability of the resulting ontologies and would therefore decrease their engineering cost. Unfortunately, only a few ODP exist for the legal domain, since their development can be difficult and their added value has not been convincingly demonstrated yet. The second notion is due to the fact, that too few ODP are publicly available and ready to use. To standardize and accelerate the development of legal ODP, we aim to develop a methodology for creating ODP, tailored to the specific needs of the legal domain. In this paper we will present the basic structure of this methodology, which we will further developed in future work.