Name: MELISSA ZORZANELLI COSTA
Publication date: 23/10/2024
Examining board:
Name |
Role |
|---|---|
| DAVIDSON CURY | Examinador Interno |
| JOAO PAULO ANDRADE ALMEIDA | Presidente |
| RENATA SILVA SOUZA GUIZZARDI | Examinador Externo |
Summary: This dissertation presents a conceptual modeling approach to improving knowledge
management in the legal domain, aiming to make the tacit knowledge embedded in
legal texts and procedures explicit. The focus of this work is a specific type of judicial
appeal, known as the Request For Standardizing the Interpretation of a Federal Law
(RS) (Pedido de Uniformização da Interpretação de Lei Federal – PU), which seeks
to standardize the understanding of Special Federal Courts’ Appeal Panels (Turmas
Recursais) of the Federal Special Courts (Juizados Especiais Federais) in Brazil. The
general objective of this research is the representation of knowledge in the legal domain,
which is characterized by its complexity both in structural and procedural terms. A
key issue identified is the lack of proper structuring of legal data, which compromises
transparency and accessibility, making it difficult not only for legal professionals but
also for IT specialists who develop technological solutions and analyze legal information.
To address this issue, this work proposes the development of an ontology based on the
Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) to capture the structural aspects of the domain,
integrated with the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) to model the dynamic
aspects of judicial procedures. A multi-viewpoint approach is proposed to represent
both structural and dynamic aspects of the legal domain by integrating ontologies
and process models. The research also introduces a semantic integration between
the ontology, aligned with Brazilian legal norms through the LexML identification
scheme, and process modeling, as a multi-perspective approach. The applicability of the
developed ontology was evaluated through a complete Extract, Transform, Load (ETL)
process to convert data related to PU appeals and their rulings into triples. An OWL
rendering of OntoRS, based on gUFO, was used to transform the extracted data into an
appropriate RDF format and populate a Virtuoso triple store. Consequently, the OntoRS
ontology enabled SPARQL queries to derive insights, metrics, and small RDF graphs. The
BPMN model was evaluated in two stages: first, qualitative interviews with legal experts,
and second, a questionnaire based on the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). The
final results of the questionnaire revealed that 74.8% of participants found the diagram
easy to use, 85.4% considered it useful, and 84.6% expressed an intention to adopt it. Both
the interviews and the questionnaire yielded favorable results. Based on this, it was
concluded that the diagram meets expectations. Therefore, this research contributes to
a better organization and accessibility of legal data, facilitating the understanding and
use of information not only by legal professionals but also by IT specialists, promoting
a more effective integration between the legal and technological domains.
