Whereas ordinary legal documents are deployed as text documents for human consumption, AI & Law focuses on tackling the challenges surrounding the development of legal ontologies to assign meaning to legal provisions. We have witnessed an explosion of legal domain (and application) ontologies loosely based on sustainable theories, harming reusability. Fortunately, foundational ontologies foster interoperability between these domain ontologies, providing context-independent concepts that are usable and reusable across multiple domains. In particular, legal ontologies require this “conciliation” with other foundational ontologies, given the inherent heterogeneity of the domain, such as the criminal domain. This paper describes a core legal ontology, built top-down from the UFO foundational ontology, engineered using the positivist legal theory of Hans Kelsen, fostering reusability across a plurality of the criminal field. The UFO proposal makes it possible to evaluate and leverage the conceptual quality of class hierarchies and concept taxonomies through stereotyped modeling primitives and constraints. The latter regulates how the primitives can be combined to support the design of ontologically well-founded conceptual models. This study was conducted to further highlight the depiction of Crimes of Omission, which have not yet been properly explored in the available literature. Although the conceptualization is tied directly to the Brazilian legal domain, it can be applied, with slight adaptations, to other legal systems around the world that follow the Roman-Germanic (or Civil Law) system and Kelsen’s legal theory. Through these ontologies, it is possible to perform lawsuit simulation, such as the identification of a crime and imposition of penalties. At the end of this paper, we detail these possibilities for future work.
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