R. Meersman et al. (Eds.): OTM Workshops 2005, LNCS 3762, pp. 846 – 855, 2005. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005 OPJK into PROTON: Legal Domain Ontology Integration into an Upper-Level Ontology Núria Casellas 1 , Mercedes Blázquez 2 , Atanas Kiryakov 3 , Pompeu Casanovas 1 , Marta Poblet 1 , and Richard Benjamins 2 1 Institute of Law and Technology, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain {nuria.casellas, pompeu.casanovas, marta.poblet}@uab.es 2 iSOCO, Intelligent Software Components, S.A., (Madrid) Spain {mercedes,rbenjamins}@isoco.com http://www.isoco.com 3 Ontotext Lab, Sirma Group, (Sofia) Bulgaria naso@sirma.bg http://www.ontotext.bg Abstract. The SEKT Project aims at developing and exploiting the knowledge technologies which underlie the Next Generation Knowledge Management, con- necting complementary know-how of key European centers in three areas: Ontol- ogy Management Technology, Knowledge Discovery and Human Language Technology. This paper describes the development of PROTON, an upper-level ontology developed by Ontotext, and of the Ontology of Professional Judicial Knowledge (OPJK), modeled by a team of legal experts form the Institute of Law and Technology (IDT-UAB) for the Iuriservice prototype (a webbased intelligent FAQ for the Spanish judges on their first appointment designed by iSOCO). The paper focuses on the work done towards the integration of the OPJK built using a middle-out strategy into the system and top modules of PROTON, illustrating the flexibility of this independent upper-level ontology. 1 Introduction SEKT (Semantically Enabled Knowledge Technologies) is a European research and development project within the European Commission’s Sixth Framework Pro- gramme. This project aims at connecting complementary know-how of key European centers of excellence in Ontology and Metadata Technology, Knowledge Discovery and Human Language Technology, a leading commercial exponent of semantic web technology, together with a major European ICT organization. 1 Ontologies play a central role within semantic web technologies and, for that rea- son, several domain ontologies are being modeled by the case study partners. This is the case of the Ontology of Professional Judicial Knowledge (OPJK). The OPJK ontology is developed within the SEKT Project by the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) and iSOCO to support an intelligent FAQ prototype (Iuriservice). 1 http://www.sekt-project.com