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

TL;DR

This paper discusses the development of a legal decision support system to help parents create a parenting plan after divorce, focusing on representing the complex concept of a child's well-being.

Contribution

The paper introduces a framework for a legal knowledge base that integrates commonsense, legal, and professional knowledge to handle indeterminate legal concepts.

Findings

A negotiation decision support system called PPSS was developed to assist in parenting plan creation.

The system requires integrating legal expertise with commonsense and professional knowledge.

Framing a computationally efficient knowledge base for indeterminate legal concepts remains a significant challenge.

Abstract

Despite decades of development of formal tools for modelling legal knowledge and reasoning, the creation of a fully fledged legal decision support system remains challenging. Among those challenges, such system requires an enormous amount of commonsense knowledge to derive legal expertise. This paper describes the development of a negotiation decision support system (the Parenting Plan Support System or PPSS) to support parents in drafting an agreement (the parenting plan) for the exercise of parental custody of minor children after a divorce is granted. The main objective here is to discuss problems of framing an intuitively appealing and computationally efficient knowledge base that can adequately represent the indeterminate legal concept of the well-being of the child in the context of continental legal culture and of Polish law in particular. In addition to commonsense reasoning, interpretation of such a concept demands both legal expertise and significant professional knowledge from other domains.