[EGOV LIST] CfP_Special Issue_Legal Informatics_Journal of the Knowledge Economy [IF 2, 363]

[Charalampos Alexopoulos]

Call for Papers
Special Issue: "*Foundational Approaches, Methods and Cases in Legal
Informatics*"
Journal of The Knowledge Economy [ISSN 1868-7873, IF 2,363]

*SUBMISSION DUE DATE:* 30 June 2022
*ACCEPTANCE NOTIFICATION:* 31 August 2022
*REVISED VERSION SUBMITTED:* 31 October 2022
*PUBLICATION IN ONLINE MODE:* 30 November 2022
*SUBMISSION PLATFORM:*  Select the Legal Informatics special issue from the
menu that will appear during the submission process. After registering on
the Editorial Manager system at
https://www.editorialmanager.com/jkec/default1.aspx follow the instructions
to submit your manuscript.

*We would appreciate a prompt reply within two weeks about your decision.*

I remain at your disposal for any further information about the special
issue.

Guest Editor,
Charalampos Alexopoulos
alexop at aegean.gr


*DESCRIPTION:*

Data has become the lifeblood of the modern global economy and is found at
the heart of almost all strategic decision making. Recent trends in
digitalization, open data, and social media movements have resulted in an
exponential increase in the amount of data available for use in making
sense of socio-economic and political phenomena. Repositories of large
quantities of new information – including expert knowledge, sensor data,
text, social media posts - have become available to a wide number of actors
in society. Advanced, intelligent computer systems, together with
sophisticated techniques of data harvesting, annotation, analysis and
visualisation have enhanced our ability to comprehend, display and
disseminate complex, temporal and spatial information to diverse audiences.
This is especially true for legal information, as more and more legal data
is digitized, organized into legal databases, and made available in machine
readable formats.


The Legal Informatics domain is concerned with the application of
informatics within the context of the legal environment, focusing on
law-related organisations, such as parliaments or national printing
offices, lawyers and law firms, courts, deliberative institutions and
public administration, as well as citizens and businesses. The big data
available – the amount of data produced is growing exponentially – permits
machines to turn data into information, and to use information for personal
behaviors for extracting knowledge. Artificial intelligence, legal
analytics, machine learning, natural language processing, text mining and
blockchain have, in the last five years, through their application to
concrete domains, , including the legal environment and the legal
informatics discipline, paved the way for the emergence of  a new services
and tools that may be used to extract, organize and manipulate data.


The study of legal informatics is important for two fundamental reasons. On
the one hand, the law-making and courts-decision processes, in an informed
society, face the requirement to be “evidence-based”, with factual evidence
being deemed the prerequisite to guarantee the quality of decision and
legislation. On the other hand, transparency, explicability, efficiency and
effectiveness are the basic prerequisites in the public sector, including
within the legal domain. Thus, new approaches utilizing the above-mentioned
technologies are emerging in order for the designed services to provide
information about the potential and actual impact of decisions and
policies, enhance trust and accountability among governments, citizens and
businesses, prevent bias on proceedings with cross jurisdictional
boundaries, facilitate the rules depend on a particular jurisdiction and
assist dispute resolution process.


A number of challenges still persist and are worthy of further
enquiry.  Firstly,
the combination of the basic characteristics of these technological trends
would eventually lead to the total reform of the legal sector either in
law-making or in the legal industry. But first legal information needs to
be described, annotated and semantically enriched. A second great challenge
within the domain is the so-called, “Responsible AI” and explicable AI,
which has been raising awareness of the potential threats of AI to a
“healthy development” of society, and there is an ongoing discussion to
what extent normative regulations are required to control the use of AI.
This new approach includes also a new ethics dimension creating a digital
ethics analytic method by-design to introduce with the other disciplines.



OBJECTIVE OF THE SPECIAL ISSUE:


This special issue aims at exploring the importance of legal information
and legal data in the context of the global knowledge economy.
Contributions presenting practical application, foundational approaches,
tools, case studies and theoretical frameworks for the creation, processing
and publishing of legal documents as open data towards citizens,
practitioners and administrations are therefore encouraged. Specific
emphasis may be given to legal text mining, legal XML standards and models,
legal ontologies, as well as further legal argumentation and reasoning
models and approaches towards more automated legal services and information
systems. We solicit for papers covering both organizational and technical
aspects and combining theory and practice. Papers taking interdisciplinary
approaches and covering a multitude of aspects are strongly encouraged.
Furthermore, we promote a diversity of research methods to study the
challenges of this multifaceted discipline including best practices, case
studies, design approaches, literature reviews and interviews.



RECOMMENDED TOPICS:

Topics to be discussed in this special issue include (but are not limited
to) the following:

   - Practical implementations of legal standards in national and EU context
   - AI and NLP concepts, methods and applications in legal informatics
   - Blockchain and smart contracts concepts, methods and applications in
   legal informatics
   - Responsible and Explainable AI in the legal sector
   - Creating Big Legal Open Data
   - Legal Knowledge Graphs and ontological alignment
   - Metadata and semantic approaches in the legal sector
   - Automated decision-making using Data Mining, Machine Learning and
   Artificial Intelligence algorithms in legal domain
   - Extracting value from big legal open data through text mining
   - Legal data analytics
   - Knowledge extraction from legal documents
   - Policy analytics, processing and intelligence for legal domain
   - Data-driven strategies and policies using legal big data
   - AI for eGovernment using legal rules
   - Data quality, authenticity and provenance of legal big data
   - Data protection, security and trust of the legal big data
   - Ownership and legal big data and documents
   - Ethical considerations in the application of Artificial Intelligence
   in Government
   - Methods and technologies leading to enhanced digital public services
   - Data-driven public sector innovations and applications
   - Architectural Legal standards, principles and frameworks
   - Semantic ontologies, web services and modeling for legal governmental
   infrastructures
   - Legal Data platforms, interoperability and information sharing



SUBMISSION PROCEDURE:

·       Researchers and practitioners are invited to submit papers for this
special theme issue on Foundational Approaches, Methods and Cases in Legal
Informatics *on or before 30 June 2022*.

·       All submissions must be original and may not be under review by
another publication.

·       Please make sure your papers reflect the Special Issue thematic
foci as well as the core concepts and themes of the JKEC in general.

·       Interested authors should consult the journal’s guidelines for
manuscript submissions at
https://www.springer.com/journal/13132/submission-guidelines

·       Authors should make clear when submitting their paper that it
should be referred for review to the Editors of the Legal Informatics
Special Issue: after registering on the Editorial Manager system at
https://www.editorialmanager.com/jkec/default1.aspx follow the instructions
to submit your manuscript.  Select the Legal Informatics special issue from
the menu that will appear during the submission process.

·       All submitted papers will be reviewed on *a single-blind peer
review basis. Papers must follow APA style for reference citations.*



All inquiries should be should be directed to the attention of:

Charalampos Alexopoulos
E-mail: alexop at aegean.gr