Legal Agent Research & Development Group at the University of economy, vienna a cooperation between KnowledgeCity and the Univ. of economy Vienna Knowledge City Mag Thomas Hulka Burggasse 20/2/15 1070 Vienna a8603324@unet.univie.ac.at The foundation and objectives of the group The Legal Agent Research & Development Group was founded in summer 1998 by the faculty of accounting and taxation (Prof. Hörmann, accounting.wu- wien.ac.at/Institut/mitarbeiter/hörmann/imhörmann_index.htm) and KnowledgeCity (Thomas Hulka, a8603324@unet.univie.ac.at). The groups goal is the development of a tool for modelling legal sources, mainly tax-law, that enables members of the institute to knowledge-engineer their domain. Building on the results achieved by European researchers in the field of legal expert systems (e.g. at the Universities of Amsterdam and Liverpool), we emphasise the development of such systems in an agent architecture, meaning that: 1. research is focused towards the creation of real-world systems. 2. these systems shall be economically efficient. The second point is the basis of our work and includes several ideas regarding the lowering of development-costs (e.g. by the development of the mentioned RAD- tool) as well as the search for an exploitation of the technology as far as possible. The Increase of the complexity of law in the EC Legal agents are efficient where complex law has to be applied. That is not only the lawyers office, but also every business unit or public authority. Our agents should primarily assist in daily business-work that is done in an increasing complex legal framework. The reason for this increasing complexity lies in the integration of the EC itself: As the system of legal EC-rules usually differs from the various national legal systems, the national legislation is often forced to mix two different legal systems in national law, resulting in complex rules (consider the VAT-rules for example). Providing a tool to manage these complexity is our goal. Some applications of legal agents and their connection with other agents We think of three main application areas: 1. Generally, legal agents are useful in managing complex legal domains, like the VAT, public procurement, or labour law. Consumers may be lawyers as well as non-lawyers. 2. As legal work is done in a conceptualised domain, it should be possible to model a big part of it, thus providing the base for KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT in the legal domain. By assigning information to the respective ontology, the information is actualised when needed. Consumers will be lawyers or public authorities. 3. Beyond that, legal agents can be used for problem solving, as for example for tax planning purposes. Interdependence with other agents could include agents for electronic commerce (interactive application of VAT-laws, transfer of online-business into the accounting system) or I2As on funding. Furthermore legal agents could integrated into workflow-systems, especially for public authorities or other entities dealing with complex laws. Legal Agent Research & Development as a node of AgentLink We are primarily dealing with (legal-, business-, enterprise-) knowledge engineering. We plan to have a working version of our tool, that parses texts and filters ontology-names out of it and transfers them into a modelling tool to continue modelling, in about six months. We would like to get experiences of other researchers with similar tools, but most important would be to hear about other ontologies, that could be relevant for our domain (e.g. business- ecommerce- ontologies). As the legal framework is the base of decisions in business, our ontologies may also be of relevance for others: we are glad about every exchange in that matter. Finally we are interested which ONTOLOGY- LANGUAGES are used by other members. We will have to decide on an appropriate AGENT-ARCHITECTURE. We would appreciate to find such framework that was done by another node and join collaboration. A Web-page with further information will be up in the next few weeks, on the institutes page.