Abstract
There has been an increase use of Domain-Specific Visual Modeling Language (DSVML) as a means of improving models' comprehensibility and, consequently, stakeholders' productivity. Combining the benefits of DSVMLs and of an ontological approach for designing and evaluating DSVMLs, we present, in this paper, the first-steps towards an ontology-based DSVML in the legal domain called LawV. The main purpose of LawV is to provide for a visual symbolic representation for legal statements. LawV has been built by applying an ontology-based language engineering method called PoNTO-S and UFO-L, a legal core ontology. To evaluate LawV, we instantiate a judicial case selected from the database of Appeal Court of the Espirito Santo State in Brazil.