YEARS OF EUROPEAN ONLINE ANNÉES DE EN LIGNE ...

WORKSHOP
the tool could prove to be very useful for practicing lawyers and for
judges, because it lets the user shift very easily from one system of national
law to another.
the system works not only on single terms, but also on expressions, as
the example of ‘good faith’ showed. By clicking successively on ‘European’,
and then ‘Show other linguistic versions’, the user obtains the equivalent of
‘good faith’ in all ive languages and sees that there are several french equivalent
terms: loyauté, bonne foi, en traitant de façon loyale et équitable: clicking on ‘Association’
reveals the term used for national implementation: bonne exécution des
obligations.
Let me close this presentation with a word about ontology. the ontology
related to this programme has been elaborated by colleagues together with
computer scientists. It permits the development of an expert system which
will make the dictionaries within the Syllabus able to communicate with
others using analogue ontologies.
finally, the system allows for statistics. It gives a set of European terms
with distinctive transpositions in national law. It consists of a list of terms
used at European level and the corresponding — different — terms used at
national level. It illustrates how the language of European law differs from
the language of national law, even though it is the same, common language.
As an example, European law says Angebot for ‘offer’, but German national
law uses Antrag. the list is rather long and one could speculate about
whether this was done on purpose or whether there were simply mistakes.
when talking about access to data and databases using searches on terms,
problems might arise as these systems are rather rigid when it comes to recognising
or not recognising words. for instance, if the user searches for Angebot
in the national legislative level, he will not ind anything as there is nothing like
Angebot: German national law uses Antrag. thus the only way to perform fruitful
searches is to apply semantic tools. Semantic tools enable the user to capture
both Angebot and Antrag.
General statistics concerning the number of terms already worked out and
synonymies offer lists of terms used within the same context. this is where
the real connection between ‘ontology’ and Syllabus appears. Each entry provides
a single link in the ontology, which refers to all concepts.
As mentioned before, the project team tried to make the tool useful for
several groups of users. there is a level for ‘general users’ as well as a specialist
level: an ontologist can work out ontologies and can have access to the
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