FOLIO - The Federated Open Legal Information Ontology

August 21, 2025 · View on GitHub

FOLIO Logo

License: CC BY 4.0 License: MIT

Overview

FOLIO (Federated Open Legal Information Ontology) is an open, CC-BY licensed standard designed to represent universal elements of legal data. It improves communication and data interoperability across the legal industry by providing a comprehensive ontology and taxonomy for legal concepts.

Repository Contents

  • FOLIO.owl: The primary OWL (Web Ontology Language) file containing the FOLIO ontology
  • documentation/ (coming soon): Detailed documentation on FOLIO concepts and usage
  • examples/ (coming soon): Sample implementations and use cases

Key Features

  • Comprehensive: Over 18,000 standardized concepts covering a wide range of legal terms
  • Unique Identifiers: Every concept has a unique IRI (Internationalized Resource Identifier)
  • Multilingual Support: Translations for the ten most common languages
  • Open Development: Collaboratively developed by legal professionals, technologists, and domain experts

Getting Started

  1. Clone this repository: 
    git clone https://github.com/alea-institute/folio.git
  2. Explore the FOLIO.owl file using an ontology editor like Protégé or WebProtégé
  3. Refer to the documentation for implementation guidelines

Use Cases

FOLIO can be applied in various legal technology scenarios, including:

  • Contract Management
  • Case Management
  • Generative AI for legal applications
  • Legal research and analytics
  • Regulatory compliance

Implementation

  1. Explore: Review our documentation, tutorials, and examples
  2. Integrate: Use the FOLIO OWL data or API in your systems and services
  3. Collaborate: Share your experiences and contribute to improving the standard

Contributing

We welcome contributions from the legal and technology communities. Please see our CONTRIBUTING.md(coming soon) file for guidelines on how to participate in FOLIO's development.

Community and Support

License

The data in this repository is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License][cc-by].

Any source is licensed under the MIT license.

Prior versions of a related project were available under an MIT license. The list of all original contributors can be reviewed there.

For more information, visit openlegalstandard.org.