Framing a Knowledge Base for a Legal Expert System Dealing with Indeterminate Concepts

Area of Science:

• Legal informatics
• Artificial intelligence in law
• Family law systems

Background:

• Formal tools for legal knowledge modeling have existed for decades, yet fully functional legal decision support systems remain elusive.
• A significant challenge is the requirement for vast amounts of commonsense knowledge to achieve legal expertise.
• Existing systems often struggle with the nuanced and indeterminate nature of legal concepts.

Purpose of the Study:

• To describe the development of a negotiation decision support system (Parenting Plan Support System - PPSS).
• To support parents in creating parenting plans for child custody post-divorce.
• To address the challenges of creating an intuitive and computationally efficient knowledge base for the concept of 'child's well-being' within Polish law.

Main Methods:

• Development of a specialized knowledge base for legal reasoning.
• Incorporation of commonsense reasoning capabilities.
• Focus on representing the indeterminate legal concept of 'child's well-being'.
• Adaptation to the continental legal culture and specificities of Polish law.

Main Results:

• The paper details the challenges encountered in knowledge representation for legal concepts.
• It highlights the necessity of integrating legal expertise with domain-specific knowledge.
• The PPSS aims to bridge the gap between formal legal modeling and practical application in divorce proceedings.

Conclusions:

• Representing indeterminate legal concepts like 'child's well-being' is a complex task requiring more than just formal logic.
• Effective legal decision support systems necessitate a blend of commonsense reasoning, legal expertise, and interdisciplinary knowledge.
• The PPSS offers a potential framework for addressing these challenges in the context of post-divorce parenting agreements.