An Annotation Language for Semantic Search of Legal Sources

While formalizing legal sources is an important challenge, the generation of a formal representation from legal texts has been far less considered and requires considerable expertise. In order to improve the uniformity, richness, and efficiency of legal annotation, it is necessary to experiment with annotations and the annotation process. This paper reports on a first experiment, which was a campaign to annotate legal instruments provided by the Scottish Government's Parliamentary Counsel Office and bearing on Scottish smoking legislation and regulation. A small set of elements related to LegalRuleML was used. An initial guideline manual was produced to annotate the text using annotations related to these elements. The resulting annotated corpus is converted into a LegalRuleML XML compliant document, then made available via an online visualisation and query tool. In the course of annotating the documents, a range of important interpretive and practical issues arose, highlighting the value of a focused study on legal text annotation.