Evaluating DILIGENT Ontology Engineering in a Legal Case Study
Christoph Tempich, H. Sofia Pinto, York Sure, Denny Vrandečić, Núria Mach, Pompeu Casanovas · 2005
In the IST project SEKT – Semantically Enabled Knowledge Technologies – one of the case studies [BCC05] aims at providing an intelligent Frequently Asked Questions system, Iuriservice prototype II, that will offer help to newly appointed judges in Spain. This iFAQ uses ontology based Semantic Web technologies to retrieve FAQ to reply queries posed in natural language. In order to construct the underlying ontology, we used the ontology engineering methodology DILIGENT. DILIGENT [PTSS04] methodology is intended to support domain experts in a distributed setting to engineer and evolve ontologies with the help of a fine-grained methodological approach based on Rhetorical Structure Theory [MT87]. Although, knowledge acquisition and other content issues are not discussed in this paper, harmonization efforts for knowledge modelling are required by discussing the ontology. During the discussion, participants exchange arguments which may support or object to certain ontology engineering decisions. As any legal professional knows, tracking the argumentation of decisions is essential in allowing later readers to understand them. We will present an evaluation framework to evaluate the methodology within this particular context. We will take a detailed look at the development of the ontology and especially the novel experience of using a wiki to support the collaborative ontology engineering and to capture the ongoing discussion of the ontology. First results of this evaluation