Legal Knowledge Interchange Format

European-funded project to extend rule languages (particularly RIF, SWRL, RuleML at the time) to cover legal domain. Can do (some?) reasoning with Carneades.

Much more nuanced take on law than prior formats (imo). From Constructing Legal Arguments with Rules in the Legal Knowledge Interchange Format (LKIF):

• "Legal rules are neither material implications nor procedures for updating variables in working memory, but rather schemes for constructing legal arguments."
  
• "Argumentation cannot be reduced to logic."
  
• "legal rules are interpreted as policies for reasoning in resource-limited, decision-making processes."
  
• "The semantics of negation is dialectical, not classical negation or negation-as-failure."
  

Is this more faithful modelling of legal reasoning a good thing? Heavy focus on the construction of arguments, but it seems to me that arguing is precisely what e.g. Axa does not want to do. As much as realists scoff at "mechanical jurisprudence", that's exactly what Axa wants! Not to say that realists are wrong about law, but that "law" isn't what Axa wants in the first place.