This session will describe my efforts to develop a legal ontology for teaching legal research. There are currently more than twenty legal ontologies worldwide that encompass legal knowledge, legal problem solving, legal drafting and information retrieval, and subjects such as IP, but no ontology of legal research. A legal research ontology could be useful because the transition from print to digital sources has shifted the way research is conducted and taught. Legal print sources have much of the structure of legal knowledge built into them (see the attached slide comparing screen shots from Westlaw and WestlawNext), so teaching students how to research in print also helps them learn the subject they are researching. With the shift to digital sources, this structure is now only implicit, and researchers must rely more upon a solid foundation in the structure of legal knowledge. The session will also describe my choice of OWL as the language that best meets the needs in building this ontology. The session will also explore the possibilities of representing this legal ontology in a more compact visual form to make it easier to incorporate into legal research instruction.
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