Currently, several artificial intelligence technologies are growing increasingly mature, including computational modelling of reasoning, natural language processing, information retrieval, information extraction, machine learning, electronic agents, and reasoning with uncertainty. Their integration in and adaptation to legal knowledge and information systems need to be studied. Parallel to this development, e-government applications are gradually gaining ground among local, national, European and international institutions. Over 25 years of research in the field of legal knowledge and information systems have resulted in many models for legal knowledge representation and reasoning. However, authors and reviewers rightly remarked that there are still some essential questions to be solved. First, there is a need for the integration and harmonisation of the models. Secondly, there is the difficult problem of knowledge acquisition in a domain that is in constant evolution.
If one wants to realise a fruitful marriage between artificial intelligence and e-government, the aid of technologies that automatically extract knowledge from natural language and from other forms of human communication and perception is needed.