There is a surge observed in research and applications of computer science and artificial intelligence in the legal domain. The related term computational law is commonly defined as "the branch of Legal Informatics concerned with the representation of rule and regulations in computable form" [Genesereth and Chaudhri, 2022]. The focus of an important percentage of related work on computational law is on automatic processing, generation, or understanding of legal documents [Küçük and Can, 2024]. Recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), such as generative AI models, pre-trained language models (PLMs) or large language models (LLMs), and chatbots developed using such models, have also affected the domain of computational law, and this dramatic impact is also acknowledged by legal professionals [Goth, 2024]. Undoubtedly, annotated or unannotated datasets and benchmarks in digital form are required for legal AI studies on legal texts, in order to facilitate model training, and to ensure sound comparisons of different approaches to the problems pertaining to computational law.

Despite the availability of vast amounts of data, legal data is often unstructured, making it difficult even for law practitioners to ingest and comprehend the same. It is important to organise the legal information in a way that is useful for practitioners and downstream automation tasks. The word ontology was used by Greek philosophers to discuss concepts of existence, being, becoming and reality. Today, scientists use this term to describe the relation between concepts, data, and entities. A great example for a working ontology was developed by Dhani and Bhatt. This ontology deals with Indian court cases on intellectual property rights (IPR) The future of legal ontologies is likely to be handled by computer experts and legal experts alike.

Ontology is a popular method for knowledge representation in different domains, including the legal domain, and description logics (DL) is commonly used as its description language. To handle reasoning based on inconsistent DL-based legal ontologies, the current paper presents a structured argumentation framework particularly for reasoning in legal contexts on the basis of ASPIC+, and translates the legal ontology into formulas and rules of an argumentation theory. With a particular focus on the design of autonomous vehicles from the perspective of legal AI, we show that using this combined theory of formal argumentation and DL-based legal ontology, acceptable assertions can be obtained based on inconsistent ontologies, and the traditional reasoning tasks of DL ontologies can also be accomplished. In addition, a formal definition of explanations for the result of reasoning is presented.

The LOAIT workshop aims at offering an overview of theories and well-founded applications that combine Legal Ontologies and AI techniques. Similarly to past events organized in conjunction with ICAIL-97, Jurix 2001 and ICAIL-03 the LOAIT workshop will constitute a valuable opportunity for researchers and practitioners in AI, AI&Law, Legal Ontologies and related fields to discuss problems, exchange information and compare perspectives.

Some of the top legal ontologies developed so far include the Functional Ontology for Law [FOLaw] The increasing need for legal information and content (Valente 1995), the Frame-Based Ontology (van Kralingen management caused by the growing amount of 1995), the LRI-Core ontology (Breuker 2004), unstructured (or poorly structured) legal data managed by DOLCE CLO [Core Legal Ontology] (Gangemi et al. legal publishing companies, law firms and public 2003), or the Ontology of Fundamental Concepts (Rubino administrations, or the increasing amount of legal et al. 2006, Sartor 2006) the basis for the LKIF-Core information directly available on the World Wide Web, Ontology (Breuker et al. 2007). Nevertheless, most legal have created an urgent need to construct conceptual ontologies are domain specific ontologies, which represent structures for knowledge representation to share and particular legal domains towards search, indexing and manage intelligently all this information, whilst making reasoning in a specific domain of national or European law human-machine communication and understanding (e.g. the IPRONTO ontology by Delgado et al. 2003, the possible.