Semantic interoperability is a growing and challenging subject in the healthcare domain. It aims to ensure a coherent and unambiguous exchange, use, and reuse of health information among different systems and applications. In the context of the EUCAIM (Cancer Image Europe) project, semantic interoperability among various heterogeneous cancer image data models is required to support the communication, integration, and sharing of data in a standardized and structured way. For this purpose, hyper-ontology is developed as a common semantic meta-model that bridges the disparate imaging and clinical knowledge of the various repositories in EUCAIM and supports their integration. EUCAIM’s hyper-ontology is also an application-based ontology targeted for federated semantic querying and image annotation. To facilitate the hyper-ontology building process and ensure the extensibility of the ontology model, an iterative hybrid well-founded approach that divides the ontology structure into layers and modules is established.

The primary goal of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is to regulate the rights and duties of citizens and organizations over personal data protection. Implementing the GDPR is recently gaining much importance for legal reasoning and compliance checking purposes. In this work, we aim to capture the basics of GDPR in a well-founded legal domain modular ontology named OPPD (Ontology for the Protection of Personal Data). Ontology-Driven Conceptual Modeling (ODCM), ontology layering, modularization, and reuse processes are applied. These processes aim to support the ontology engineer in overcoming the complexity of the legal knowledge and developing an ontology model faithful to reality. ODCM is used for grounding OPPD in the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO). Ontology modularization and layering aim to simplify the ontology building process. Ontology reuse focuses on selecting and reusing Conceptual Ontology Patterns (COPs) from UFO and the legal core ontology UFO-L. OPPD intends to overcome the lack of a representation of legal procedures that most ontologies encountered. The potential use of OPPD is proposed to formalize the GDPR rules by combining ontological reasoning and Logic Programming.

In this paper, we present an ontology-based liability decision support task in the international maritime law, specifically the domain of carriage of goods by sea. We analyze the liabilities of the involved legal agents (carriers and shippers) in case of loss or damage of goods. Thus, a well-founded legal domain ontology, named CargO-S, is used. CargO-S has been developed using an ontology-driven conceptual modeling process, supported by reusing foundational and legal core ontologies. In this work, we demonstrate the usability of CargO-S to design and implement a set of chained rules describing the procedural aspect of the liabilities legal rules. Finally, we employ these rules in a liability rule-based decision support task using a real case study.

The ontology engineering community is facing several key challenges about the development of domain ontologies. One major challenge is the building of well-founded domain ontologies. This concept has raised recently and it refers to ontologies that are grounded in validated foundational ontologies. This paper addresses the effective contribution of ontology-driven conceptual modeling process (ODCM) for developing such ontologies in the legal domain. A case study in the domain of carriage of goods by sea is presented.

International audience

International audience

This research aims to define an integrated strategy for modelling legal norms in the criminal domain for supporting the legal reasoning. For this purpose, OWL-DL criminal domain ontology is captured from legal texts, using a middle-out approach, and legal rules are then formalized based on the ontology. The goal is to construct a legal rule-based decision support system for the Lebanese criminal domain, grounded on the integration of the criminal domain ontology and set of logic rules which are defined using the expressive ability of SWRL rule language.