YEARS OF EUROPEAN ONLINE ANNÉES DE EN LIGNE ...

EUR-LEX: FROM DATA STRUCTURES
TO LEGAL ONTOLOGIES
INtRODUCtION
Lawyers as knowledge workers have to cope with a tremendous load of
information. In the legal domain, almost all available information is stored as
text, most of the time in relatively unstructured forms (Stranieri and Zeleznikow,
2005). As legal work consists in solving legal problems, consultation of various
texts is a prerequisite of legal work. this legal research can be outsourced to
paralegals but at the very end highly qualiied lawyers have to reine the often
high quantity of search results in order to get a corpus of relevant legal texts.
Given the high costs and time constraints, improvements of existing legal
databases in order to reduce this process of reining search results would be
highly welcome to lawyers. this assessment is also correct for EU law. the
burden of legal search may be even higher due to insuficiently known EU
terminology that differs from familiar national terminology.
Information retrieval was, and is still, the most obvious and frequently
used method to tackle this research task. Given the limitations of information
retrieval, enhancements are required and thus are the subject of research. Besides
ongoing efforts to improve information retrieval (e.g. SIGIR conferences
( 1 )), legal ontologies as a formalisation tool of knowledge have received
considerable attention in recent years. Ontologies may provide a solution for
this problem because users can reuse formalised knowledge on the text corpus
and its terminology.
In this contribution, an idea for a new approach for structuring legal databases
using ontologies is described and developed based on the example of the database
on European law, EUR-Lex ( 2 ) formerly CELEX (for an overview of EUR-Lex/
CELEX see: 25 years of European law online, Publications Ofice, Luxembourg, 2006).
for the sake of better understanding, let us start with a sketchy deinition.
An ontology is a data model that represents a set of concepts within a domain
ERICH SCHWEIGHOFER
Associate Professor
at Vienna University
(on leave); case handler
for State aid in the
Directorate-General
for Agriculture and Rural
Development, European
Commission, Brussels
( 1 ) website: http://www.sigir.org.
( 2 ) website: http://eur-lex.europa.eu.
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