Mediation, ODR, and the web 2.0: a case for relational justice

Dialogue, negotiation and mediation are renewed sources of contemporary law, and technology plays an active role in this process. User-centered strategies of the next Web generation are most suited to a relational justice model based on cooperative behavior, agreement, negotiation, and dialogue among both natural and artificial actors. In this paper we introduce Ontomedia, a project implementing the relational justice model by developing a web platform for online mediation. Ontomedia is designed as a semantically-driven web service that allows end-users to negotiate and mediate their conflicts in different domains (i.e. family and commerce). We situate this project within the next generation of Semantic Web services, and the so-called Web 2.0 (and Web 3.0) developments.