What a Legal CBR Ontology Should Provide

This paper discusses the state of the art in CBR ontologies from the perspective of one developing an improved system for case-based legal reasoning. The paper proposes three specific roles for a CBR ontology and illustrates them in the context of the intended output of the new system: a legal classroom discussion of how to decide a case featuring hypothetical reasoning and abstract analogies. The paper distills the ontological requirements for modeling the example’s case-based arguments and assesses whether current research can meet those requirements. The concrete example helps to focus on and define goals for improving CBR ontologies.