RDFox and Legislate: The Legal Knowledge Graph

Legislate is a platform that allows small businesses and landlords to easily manage their legal documents. Legislate combines technical and legal expertise to make the tedious procedure of creating and processing legal documents easier as well as skipping over legalese; making documents easy to understand for all parties involved. Legislate’s patent for knowledge graph approach to smart documents is how Legislate uses RDFox to maximise their potential.

Why did Legislate start using RDFox and how do we use it?

Knowledge graphs are very powerful, and the flexible, interconnected nature of data storage in a knowledge graph is perfect for Legislate. Oxford Semantic Technologies (OST) offers rule-based reasoning which is especially useful for Legislate as logic can be used to extract key information from a contract that might be useful to a user. For small businesses, landlords and letting agents, knowledge graphs can be used to provide a deeper insight into their activities. For example, Legislate uses RDFox for metrics to calculate things like the total expenditure of a company for its employee salaries; which is useful because it provides the most up-to-date and accurate answers and saves users time and effort. Generally, this metric would require HR to manually extract the values from pdf contracts, enter them into a spreadsheet, update the formulas and finally calculate values accordingly; so providing instant access to these values via our platform is a great asset. 

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What do Legislate like about RDFox?

RDFox has the ability to compute calculations extremely quickly and incrementally. This means that the results are updated automatically each time new data is created. For example, the total payroll will be determined automatically when a new employment contract is created or is terminated. The great support from OST has also allowed Legislate to understand “best practices” of RDFox, as well as understanding how to organise the data in order to make it easy to understand and easy to work with. Knowledge graphs are the future of data modelling and having the ability to implement best practices is important because it makes data manipulation easier in the future.

What’s next for Legislate and RDFox?

Legislate is currently working on representing its knowledge graph visually, which will allow users to visualise their contracts making them easier to digest for everyone involved. Each contract has differing terms depending on the requirements of the parties involved, and contracts can often be difficult to understand. Legislate is working to make this easier by splitting up the contract depending on the type of information entered, using logic and domain rules. It will allow both parties to easily view their restrictions and obligations without having to search through the document for them every time.

Legislate is also working on implementing faceted search into the platform, which would allow users to search through contracts with options that can be determined dynamically, depending on the data available in the contracts. Users will then be able to filter their contracts which is useful for landlords or businesses who may have hundreds of tenants or employees; but might want to filter by the rent they are charging or the salary they offer.

If you’d like to make use of Legislate to effortlessly generate lawyer-approved contracts on no legal budget, you can over at Legislate.tech.

About the Author

This blog was written by Vaishali Raghvani, a knowledge engineer from Legislate who has been using RDFox every day since joining in January 2020. As a Mechanical Engineering graduate and natural problem solver, Vaishali has taken to her role like a fish to water. In fact, we have been so inspired by the incredible work Vaishali has done, that this is not the first time she has been mentioned on our blog. If you would like to learn about how she got started you can read about her journey with RDFox, in the first of a two-part series.

For more information about RDFox head over to the Oxford Semantic Technologies website, or see our blog for other use cases. If you have your own ideas of how you can use RDFox, request a free trial and put them into practice.