Abstract
Over the last decades, the field of legal ontologies has seen a sharp increase in the number of published papers. The literature on legal ontologies now covers a wide variety of topics and research approaches. One of these topics is legal core ontologies, which have received significant attention since the 1990s. In order to provide an up-to-date overview of this research area, this article presents a systematic mapping study of published researches on legal core ontologies. The selected papers were analyzed and categorized according to the perspective of their main contribution as well as according to the legal theories used. The study reveals that only a small number of studies use legal theories suitable to address current societal challenges.