Legal Ontologies benefit from social media tools

'KM is concerned with how legal professionals share documents and use communication tools like blogs, wikis and e-mail, all of which are irrelevant to ontologies. Taxonomies do not appear to require an ontology’s logical facilities. In contrast to KM and taxonomies, legal ontologies have not been widely discussed among legal professionals, albeit they have long been discussed among researchers in artificial intelligence and law (cf. papers by Professor Trevor Bench-Capon).' So states Dr Adam Wyner in  a recent article a propos the deployment of social media assets and the semantic web as tools for creating legal ontologies in research resourcing.Legal ontologies are critical for the researching, managing and automating of legal knowledge, in particular for interns and law students. With ontologies, the facility of the Semantic Web for legal professionals, particularly when deploying open-source tools and social media assets for collaboration, means that searches are faster, efficient and usually more productive. The article by Dr. Wyner, suggests a powerful tool to assist in the creation and optimisation of good legal ontologies is priceless.He remarks 'As a learning tool for law students or a tool for researchers, the labor can be done by individuals using Semantic MediaWikis. As a large-scale enterprise, legal publishers or government agencies could mark up cases using tool bars integrated with word processing software so that the case is marked up as it is written up over the course of the case. Marke- up cases would add enormous value to the case corpora for legal professionals, so there is adequate incentive.'Dr. Adam Zachary Wyner is affiliated with the department of computer science at University College London, London, United Kingdom. He has a Ph.D. in linguistics from Cornell University and a Ph.D. in computer science from King's College London. He has published on topics in the syntax and semantics of natural language, as well as artificial intelligence and law concerning legal systems, language, logic and argumentation. For further information, see Dr. Wyner's blog LanguageLogicLawSoftware.