Formalising Legal Knowledge of Sri Lankan Civil Appellate High Court Domain from Ontological Perspective

Legal ontologies are used to support structuring concepts and relationships in the legal domain. In this study, we focus on the Sri Lankan Civil Appellate High Court (CAHC) domain and investigate the problem of managing the domain knowledge by building a domain ontology. To answer this problem, in this paper, we propose ontology to represent legal domain knowledge in the Sri Lankan CAHC domain. We use Methontology as the ontology development methodology and the Knowledge Representation (KR) ontology to formalise the CAHC domain concepts and to draw relationships between them. The developed ontology’s ability to appropriately model the CAHC domain is evaluated by using a set of anonymized real cases. We believe that the results of this study will benefit knowledge management efforts especially in the Sri Lankan legal context.