LegalShadow
Year: 2026
Type: software
Abstract: Judicial digital transformation generates heterogeneous ecosystems whose governance maturity is difficult to audit in a reproducible and semantically grounded manner. To address this challenge, we introduce LegalShadow, an ontology-guided digital shadow architecture that constructs a JSON-LD structural representation of a judicial institution’s public digital ecosystem from read-only web evidence and validates it against a ten-dimension governance ontology. A hierarchical coverage function (Ψ) quantifies the extent to which each ontological dimension is materialized, while a gap function (δ) prioritizes remediation. Applied to the Ecuadorian Judiciary Council through 17 dated runs, the shadow revealed moderate declarative maturity (46/100) but low semantic coverage (Ψ_global = 34.9%), highlighting the absence of structured data and public APIs as critical limitations. This reflexive finding underscores both methodological constraints and policy implications, offering a replicable protocol for extending the study to other judicial ecosystems.
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7203555385