Legal Power-Subjection Relations: Ontological Analysis and Modeling Pattern Cristine Griffo 1(B ) , Tiago Prince Sales 1 , Giancarlo Guizzardi 1,2 , and Jo˜ ao Paulo A. Almeida 2 1 Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Bolzano, Italy {cristine.griffo,tiago.princesales,gguizzardi}@unibz.it 2 Federal University of Esp´ ırito Santo, Vitoria, Brazil jpalmeida@ieee.org Abstract. The development of dependable information systems in legal contexts requires a precise understanding of the subtleties of the under- lying legal phenomena. According to a modern understanding in phi- losophy of law, much of these phenomena are relational in nature. In this paper, we employ a theoretically well-grounded legal core ontol- ogy (UFO-L) to conduct an ontological analysis focused on a funda- mental legal relation, namely, the power-subjection relation. We show that in certain cases, power-subjection relations are primitive, i.e., by means of institutional acts, other legal relations can be generated from them. Examples include relations of rights and duties, permissions and non-rights, liberties, secondary power-subjection, etc. As a contribution to the practice of conceptual modeling, and leveraging on the result of our analysis, we propose a conceptual modeling pattern, which is then applied to model a real-world case in tax law. Keywords: Ontology design pattern · Legal power · Legal relations · UFO · UFO-L 1 Introduction The development of dependable information systems in critical contexts and applications requires a precise understanding of the subtleties of the domain at hand. In these contexts, Ontology-Driven Conceptual Modeling, i.e., the prac- tice of conceptual modeling driven by formal ontological analysis [25], has been increasingly adopted. In some situations, the phenomena being analyzed crosscut several specific classes of applications. For example, an analysis of the general notion of Service Contract [9] can be captured in general reference models called Core Ontologies [10, 11]. From these ontology, a number of Ontology Design Pat- terns can be systematically extracted [10]. Finally, these patterns are reusable higher-granularity modeling primitives that can then be employed to create con- ceptual models in specific domains (e.g., healthcare service contracts, telecom- munication service contracts, etc.) [11]. c  The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Ralyt´ e et al. (Eds.): ER 2022, LNCS 13607, pp. 65–81, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17995-2_5