Geography of legal water disputes in Chile

Abstract

Water resources are the main productive source in Chile. Growing competition for water use causes conflicts which end up in courts (Courts of Appeal and The Supreme Court). Legal disputes end when the courts issue a judgement which is recorded. The volume of court decisions made makes the task of searching, analyzing, and extracting knowledge from these texts challenging. This research is aimed at developing a mapping tool to explore spatio-temporal patterns from legal records, as court decisions are an objective proxy for conflicts. Natural Language Processing techniques are applied in order to process and extract information from the court decisions to help the map visualization process. The mapping tool allows information to be visualized in different layers ranging from the whole text of the courts' decisions to maps in which one can easily find the location of the conflict or any other places mentioned in the courts' decisions being analyzed by the tool by filtering the courts' decisions through different terms and concepts. To implement the mapping tools, we combined a geographic information system, along with a search engine (Elasticsearch) and an analytic dashboard (Kibana).

Keywords

• Legal water disputes
• natural language processing
• legal analytics
• geographic information systems