Building modular legal knowledge systems

A practical legal knowledge system must be versatile and capable of supporting many fundamentally different aspects of the lawyer's work. In this paper a general framework for building knowledge systems from distinct but communicating modules is proposed. There are currently three different kinds of modules: computation, data storage, and environmental interaction. These modules include inference engines, database managers, and hypertext. Several strategies for coupling these modules are discussed. This framework is used to construct expert systems for two distinct domains: a legal expert system for labour law and a real-time expert system for process control in a pulp plant. The legal application shows that this system can be used to construct an “intelligent library”, guiding the user to relevant documents, rather than merely retrieving documents on request.