Closing the Awareness Gap Between IT Practice and IT Law

Some of the ordinary activities of IT practitioners require a certain degree of knowledge of IT law. Assuming these professionals will acquire legal knowledge better if expressed in terms familiar to them, this Chapter explores different manners of organising and presenting legal knowledge for its better cognition by IT professionals. This proposal features data models and knowledge organisation rooted in the specific legal theory of critical legal positivism of Kaarlo Tuori. It has been evaluated with an experiment, where BSc students in Computer Science have been provided with models and reference material describing the EU legislation on cookies, and have been asked specific questions. In sight of the new theoretical framework and the experiment results, we postulate that models and ontologies can bridge the knowledge gap and serve as lingua franca between the legal and the IT profession.