Ontology

Ontologies capture the primitive concepts of domains at various levels of abstractions. We propose a contract domain ontology, which refines a Core Legal. Ontology, namely UFO-L, which in turn is an extension of the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO).

The concepts of our contract ontology are as follows:

Contract: a collection of obligations and powers between two or more roles, which are assigned to parties during execution, and are concerned with two or more assets (since at least one asset should be associated with each role.

Asset: an owned (tangible or intangible) item of value. Assets include contractual considerations that a contract is concerned with. Other kinds of assets can also be used to ensure proper execution of a contract, e.g., a bill of lading for freight contracts or invoices. Asset quantity and quality constraints are typically specified in contracts.

Legal Position: legal positions are the legal relationships between roles. For our purposes, there are just two such relationships: obligations and powers.

Obligation: the legal duty of a debtor towards a creditor to bring about a certain legal situation (consequent) when another legal situation (antecedent) holds. Surviving obligations remain in effect after the termination of the contract. A 6-month nondisclosure obligation after the end of the contract is an example of a surviving obligation. Obligations usually concern assets and are instantiated by conditions (trigger).

Legal situation: a type of situation associated with a contract, obligation or power instance. Situations are states of affairs and are comprised of possibly many endurants (including other situations and relata). A situation occurs within a time interval T, but not in any of its proper subintervals.

Event: a happening that occurs at a time instance, and that cannot change. Events also have pre-state and post-state situations. For example, delivered for a product is an event whose pre-state is ‘being in transit’ and post-state is ‘being in the point of destination’.

Power: the right of a party to create, change, suspend or extinguish legal positions. A power is instantiated by a trigger and has an antecedent (legal situation) that must be met for it to become in effect.

Role: contractual roles are characterized by collections of obligations and powers they participate in.

Party: a legal agent (person or institution) who owns assets and who is assigned roles in contracts.