Condliffe, Peter, Abrahams, Brooke and Zeleznikow, John ORCID: 0000-0002-8786-2644 (2010) An OWL Ontology and Bayesian Network to Support Legal Reasoning in the Owners Corporation Domain. Proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Online Dispute Resolution (ODR Workshop'10), in conjunction with the 23rd International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems (JURIX 2010). pp. 51-62. ISSN 1613-0073

Abstract

The paper describes the development of a legal decision support guide for owners corporation cases in the state of Victoria, Australia that uses an OWL ontology and Bayesian Network to perform legal reasoning. The rate of growth of owners corporations (also known as body corporate or strata title properties) has increased significantly in the last two decades. Because of this growth, and the need to manage a rapidly expanding population, the governance and management of these entities has become an important concern for government. Conflict and its management within them is an essential element of this concern. Cases that can’t be settled through negotiation are often referred to the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal (VCAT). Using an OWL ontology we have systematically modeled legal arguments and outcomes of past cases heard by VCAT to facilitate both stand alone and Web based information retrieval, extraction and case based reasoning. A Bayesian Belief network is also used to deal with assumptions that tend to be prevalent in commonsense reasoning. Through our system we aim to provide negotiation decision support to help guide owners corporation disputants through the grievance process.

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