Moving instead of finding

Thu 02 April 2026, Philippe Ropenga Artificial intelligence Graphs

You know that a lawyer deals differently with context than a data scientist who is keen on collecting relevant data before he starts processing them.¹ Graphs help to describe connections² and to consolidate the context of a given matter³ before a client is able to know what he really wants. A legal graph may thus look very incomplete to a computer scientist. Syllogism is at the core of French civil law and Prolog. It enables the practitioner to navigate incompleteness.⁴. Markus Triska has shared his doubts about tracking visited nodes when searching a graph.⁵ Uncertainty about facts and intention disrupts progression towards a solution; the legal path followed by stakeholders often seems erratic. The Viennese scholar has recently released an inspiring video about graphs.⁶ The legal practitioner who wishes to represent legal situations in a client friendly manner understands more clearly technical challenges that he has to face thanks to it.

• The French Civil Code is complete. It contains all the necessary concepts that can be associated with one another or with the facts of a given matter by a syllogism. This means in practice that a legal graph could only be made of constants and that a non destructive approach fosters the quick use of concepts thanks to Prolog backtracking.
• Temporary high incompleteness of a legal graph can be balanced by its structure. A structure that is well understood by all stakeholders enables clients to hold firmly onto concepts as they are tossed back and forth between conflicting aspirations.
• Legal dynamics have to be preserved. Finding is the result of looking for; it does not involve moving on with what one has found. Moving on from one node to another is a powerful way to ensure that something will change by describing this change as one moves on, as in life when one tries to get out of conflict without losing everything. Combining completeness with dynamics is not problematic at all since civil law is as lively as life. A house seems to be the perfect example of immobility; it is not. When one acquires the legal title to a house, one moves from one state or concept to another: that of owner. The concept of ownership is connected with that of possession and if one does not pay attention to possession, one may see one's connection to one's piece of property broken, be it a house or a piece of software.⁷ A graph helps to quickly notice moves that may break connections.
• Dynamics are related to speed. Nodes of a legal graph will probably not change much over time to avoid disrupting the node order that parties had to agree upon. If one looks for an Easter egg in the living room and that room moves to the attic, this is still a room but such a change is disturbing. Quickly searching the graph is more important than quickly modifying its connections. It is indeed very important to explore close places before someone else moves into them and grabs an Easter egg that may be in there! One may see a graph as a network of connections between concepts that represent completeness while node attributes or weights represent dynamics. One may see the combination of completeness and dynamics by looking for node sequences or patterns when searching the graph. Variables may be part of these sequences; they are related to attributes that do not alter connections between nodes.

In brief, consider nodes and connections to see whether they enable you to move on or block you.

I wish you a Happy Easter.

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