Archive for April 28th, 2010

Research Fellow at University of Leeds

Wednesday, April 28th, 2010

On May 4, I’m taking up a research fellow position. I’ll continue to work on the IMPACT Project:

IMPACT will conduct original research to develop and integrate formal, computational models of policy and arguments about policy, to facilitate deliberations about policy at a conceptual, language-independent level.

I’ll be based at the University of Leeds, Institute of Communication Studies, in the Centre for Digital Citizenship:

The CdC’s mission is to promote outstanding research on the changing nature of citizenship in a digitally networked society and to contribute to the analysis and development of policy in this area.

I’ll be working with Ann Macintosh:

My research agenda falls within two main socio-technical areas of interest. The first concerns the societal effect of technology on governance processes and the development of an evaluation framework for eParticipation. This area of my research is providing high-level insights into the mechanisms that need to be built into future online participation systems to appreciate how, where and why people use them. My second research area is the support for citizen engagement in policy making and the provision of public agency information and knowledge. Here the focus is on the use of Web 2.0 and computer supported argumentation systems to support deliberation and knowledge sharing.

Looking forward to working on these topics!

By Adam Wyner
Distributed under the Creative Commons
Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0

New Article on Legal Case Ontologies in Knowledge Engineering Review

Wednesday, April 28th, 2010

Rinke Hoekstra and I have a paper which will appear in Knowledge Engineering Review.

A Legal Case OWL Ontology with an Instantiation of Popov v. Hayashi
Adam Wyner and Rinke Hoekstra
To appear in Knowledge Engineering Review

Abstract
The paper provides an OWL ontology for legal cases with an instantiation of the legal case Popov v. Hayashi. The ontology makes explicit the conceptual knowledge of the legal case domain, supports reasoning about the domain, and can be used to annotate the text of cases, which in turn can be used to populate the ontology. A populated ontology is a case base which can be used for information retrieval, information extraction, and case based reasoning. The ontology contains not only elements of indexing the case (e.g. the parties, jurisdiction, and date), but as well elements used to reason to a decision such as argument schemes and the components input to the schemes. We use the Protege ontology editor and knowledge acquisition system, current guidelines for ontology development, and tools for visual and linguistic presentation of the ontology.

By Adam Wyner
Distributed under the Creative Commons
Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0