OntoVAT, an ontology for knowledge extraction in VAT-related judgments

In this work, we introduce OntoVAT, a multilingual ontol- ogy designed for knowledge extraction in VAT-related legal judgments. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive ontology in the field of VAT (Value-Added Tax). The main aims of this ontology are to capture the key concepts involved in the European VAT domain and to provide an extendible and reusable knowledge representation to facil- itate the automated extraction or detection of VAT-related concepts in legal judgments. This ontology can also facilitate many other tasks of Ar- tificial Intelligence and Law (AI&Law), e.g., legal knowledge extraction, keyword extraction, topic modeling, and semantic relations extraction. OntoVAT is created using OWL as the basic format of representation, with a SKOS lexicalization. We present here a first version of the onto- logical patterns and relations of the ontology, which we release in three different languages and which is the result of an ongoing effort between computer scientists and domain experts.