Ontologies for Legal Relevance and Consumer Complaints. A Case Study in the Air Transport Passenger Domain

Applying relevant legal information to settle complaints and disputes is a common challenge for all legal practitioners and laymen. However, the analysis of the concept of relevance itself has thus far attracted only sporadic attention. This thesis bridges this gap by understanding the components of complaints, and by defining relevant legal information, and makes use of computational ontologies and design patterns to represent this relevant knowledge in an explicit and structured way. This work uses as a case-study a real situation of consumer disputes in the Air Transport Passenger domain. Two artifacts were built: the Relevant Legal Information in Consumer Disputes Ontology, and its specialization, the Air Transport Passenger Incidents Ontology, aimed at modelling relevant legal information; and the Complaint Design Pattern proposed to conceptualize complaints. In order to demonstrate the ability of the ontologies to serve as a knowledge base for a computer program providing relevant legal information, a demonstrative application was developed.