Representation of Chinese criminal law in the semantic web

SBVR's Structured English (SSE) approach has been applied to deal with problems in the United States legal domain. However, the method has scarcely been applied in Chinese legal field. In this article, we adapt the SBVR Structured English approach for the Chinese Criminal Law and express the Chinese legal rules using semi-formal and formal knowledge representation and automate the transformation from vocabularies and rules in SBVR to vocabularies and rules. Based on the representation above, we also give the preliminary reasoning process of the justifiable defense. The representation and the preliminary reasoning process lay a solid foundation for the reasoning mechanism of Chinese Criminal Law.