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6 A.I. & L. 1 (1998)

handle is hein.journals/artinl6 and id is 1 raw text is: LA Artificial Intelligence and Law 6: 1-2, 1998. 1 Editorial The special issue of the journal Artificial Intelligence and Law lying before you comprises four articles: two papers on fundamental research and two papers on practical support systems for lawyers. The two different angles of incidence rep- resented in this issue reflect the changing approach towards legal-informatics re- search. On the one hand, researchers are focussing on the 'basics' of the domain; on the other hand researchers are replying to the demand for systems that can actually offer some substantial support to lawyers. The division in the research effort has been a slow development that started a decade ago. As the era of excessive claims made by Al researchers drew to an end, a more realistic approach towards Al (and Al & Law) research was taken up. In the nineties, we are reaping the benefits of this shift in the research effort. We are getting to a stage where we can actually deliver useful applications for lawyers to work with. At the same time, the solid foundation provided by fundamental research replaces the quicksand on which much of the research in the eighties was built. The first and the second paper of this issue fall within the category of funda- mental research. Verheij, Hage and Van den Herik present an integrated view on rules and principles. They depart from the intuitive difference between reasoning with rules and reasoning with principles. Next, they argue that the difference is merely a matter of degree and that rules and principles have the same logical structure. Their claim is supported by an explicit formalization of their integrated view using Reason-Based Logic. Visser and Bench-Capon are representatives of the (growing) class of researchers showing interest in ontologies. An ontology is an explicit conceptualisation of a domain that is drawn up with an eye to developing legal knowledge systems. They compare four such conceptualizations: McCarty's language for legal discourse, Stamper's NORMA formalism, Valente's functional ontology of law and the frame-based ontology of Van Kralingen and Visser. The third and the fourth paper focus on research that has a more direct practical application. To be more precise, the papers address legal information retrieval. Uyttendaele, Moens and Dumortier describe the SALOMON project, which con- tributes towards the automatic processing of legal texts. The aim of the project is to summarise automatically Belgian criminal cases in order to improve access

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