A principled approach to developing legal knowledge systems

Abstract In this article we present a principled, four-phased approach to the development of legal knowledge systems. We set out from the well-studied CommonKADS method for the development of knowledge systems and tailor this method to the legal domain. In particular, we propose a generic legal ontology, and describe the creation of statute-specific ontologies to adopt the method for building legal systems. In the construction of these ontologies, we start from a theoretical analysis of the legal domain. The well-known example of the Imperial College Library Regulations (ICLR) is used to illustrate the method.