Terminological and Ontological Analysis of European Directives: Multilinguism in Law

This paper describes the philosophy behind our tool called "Legal Taxonomy Syllabus", the analytical instruments it provides and some case studies. The Legal Taxonomy Syllabus is an ontology based tool designed to annotate and recover multi-lingua legal information and build conceptual dictionaries. The Legal Taxonomy Syllabus allows to build legal dictionaries in a bottom up fashion starting from the annotation of legal terms by legal terminological experts and to let legal ontology engineers refine the resulting taxonomies of concepts. The Legal Taxonomy Syllabus and its analytical tools provide help to lawyers to study the peculiarities of European Union Directives concerning the polysemy of legal terms, and the terminological and conceptual misalignment. By means of two case studies we show how the Legal Taxonomy Syllabus can help the processes of drafting and translating of the Directives.