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YEARS OF EUROPEAN ONLINE ANNÉES DE EN LIGNE ...

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of knowledge and the relationships between those concepts. A lexical legal<br />

ontology consists of an enlarged thesaurus using knowledge representation<br />

techniques of informatics. for a legal database as a textual representation, an<br />

ontology means extension with semantic data allowing automated reuse of<br />

this information.<br />

REASONS fOR A NEw APPROACh USING ONtOLOGIES<br />

In 1971, the customers of CELEX were information oficers, irst those<br />

within European institutions and later also those of external clients. the technology<br />

was cumbersome but a workable strategy existed. Information oficers<br />

with a high knowledge and experience of structured data (in those days in the<br />

form of card indices) were combined with new technology: an electronic database<br />

and new search options designed according to ‘old’ search options. thus,<br />

a new form of searching was created, that, together with the excitement of<br />

going online, was considered a form of magic.<br />

As information oficers were the clients, only information hints were expected,<br />

not the presentation of all relevant information as documents in full<br />

text. Users took it for granted that results had to be checked and not all information<br />

hints would be really useful.<br />

In 2006, the situation has changed completely. the customers are now<br />

professionals or citizens. technology has greatly improved although the main<br />

concept has remained unchanged. typical users do not have suficient experience<br />

with structured data. Internet search engines such as Google are setting<br />

the new standard. with a keyword search, suficiently relevant documents<br />

should be presented irst following a good ranking algorithm. Users are now<br />

lawyers and citizens that are able to ‘google’ but do not know the particularities<br />

of legal research suficiently well due to the different text corpus and search<br />

environment.<br />

Nowadays, users prefer ‘ready-to-use’ results with high accuracy and<br />

quality and would like to avoid time-consuming and dificult interpretations of<br />

search results. Additional features have to be user-oriented and the output<br />

properly represented. moving into these ‘intelligent’ features constitutes the<br />

main challenge for EUR-Lex for the coming years.<br />

A comparison with the more developed database on legislative procedures<br />

called PreLex ( 3 ) may be illustrative. In comparison with EUR-Lex, PreLex pro-<br />

( 3 ) website: http://www.prelex.europa.eu.<br />

01_2007_5222_txt_ML.indd 138 6-12-2007 15:14:02

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