YEARS OF EUROPEAN ONLINE ANNÉES DE EN LIGNE ...
YEARS OF EUROPEAN ONLINE ANNÉES DE EN LIGNE ... YEARS OF EUROPEAN ONLINE ANNÉES DE EN LIGNE ...
Economic and Social Committee, reference notes in the Bulletin of the European Union and reports of committees of the European Parliament. the presentation in EUR-Lex remains dificult to understand; it is based on references and a result list of documents in chronological order. Lay people or less experienced lawyers often have problems in getting all relevant information. In order to overcome these deiciencies and offer the same functionalities as PreLex, the document corpus must be enlarged with all relevant documents and additional metadata have to be added. these metadata comprise information on the status and time of validity of documents in the legislative process. thus, a presentation with timeline, description of legislative procedure and additional information on the procedural steps could be created automatically by rules determining proper data interpretation. the PreLex output representation could serve as an example of appropriate visualisation. the function of EUR-Lex would not be only giving hints to useful documents but representing in real time the status of the legislative procedure of a particular Commission proposal. It does not involve much work to improve EUR-Lex with such a feature. the additional documents are available in electronic format and have only to be uploaded. (Semi)automatic text analysis may provide the additional metadata. the presentation of results can follow the PreLex example. CItAtIONS NAVIGAtOR Legal citation represents the cross-linked structure of legal acts (Schweighofer, 1999). Legal basis, preparatory acts, amendments, corrections, proposals for modiications, repeals, related case-law and literature are represented in EUR-Lex using the CELEX number as the uniform document identiier. the rich citation structure that is a legacy of CELEX is now somewhat hidden and is not properly used for searching but more for representing links to related documents. the simple search of EUR-Lex has still not the functionality of the old mistral search as the various ields are not suficiently described and combinations of ields cannot be searched ( 11 ). ( 11 ) List of ields: Amendment_to, CONSLEG, Bf, Instruments_cited, Instruments_cited_in_ case_law, case_affecting, Earlier_related_instruments, Affected_by_case, Legal_basis, Amended_by, Subsequent_related_instruments. the online guide does not contain a description of these ields. 01_2007_5222_txt_ML.indd 146 6-12-2007 15:14:03
WORKSHOP As a irst step, the existing representation of relations should be restructured using URI style references. (Semi)automatic text extraction tools may help in inding references in the various documents. the structure of citations should then be improved, focusing on the main types of legal basis, amendments and repeals, preparatory acts and proposed modiications, case-law and literature. Relations should be represented with a graph, with the document in question in the centre and with arrows linking to boxes with the various types of citations. An eficient ranking algorithm should select the most important citations. while the additional metadata does not constitute a big problem and a more appropriate visualisation may be introduced quite easily, the ranking algorithm remains the biggest challenge. So far, the otherwise helpful weighting algorithms have not worked properly in a legal environment. however, a better structured visualisation of citations provides suficient value to the user in order to focus on this improvement and postpone the weighting algorithm for later implementation. LAyERS Of thE LEGAL ORDER NAVIGAtOR A weak point of EUR-Lex is the missing (semi)automatic consolidation of legal acts. main documents, their amendments and corrections have to be consolidated by the user. Luckily, more and more acts are also available in a consolidated version. this work has greatly improved the availability of workable text versions; however, it requires a lot of resources. A restructuring of the text corpus would provide the basis for a (semi)automatic consolidation. the Austrian legal database RIS (Rechtsinformationssystem des Bundes) ( 12 ) could serve as a role model. In this database, the various laws are segmented into the subelements of sections, articles or annexes. the time of validity is stored per document segment. Standard searches also retrieve documents with a given date of validity, e.g. as a default value the day of searching. European documents are not as formally structured as Austrian laws but small adaptations will solve this problem. Recitals of the preamble could be treated like articles. A basic document would contain the title, legislative history and additional information like citations of the bundle of documents of a regulation or directive. ( 12 ) website: http://www.ris.bka.gv.at. 146 | 147 01_2007_5222_txt_ML.indd 147 6-12-2007 15:14:03
- Page 95 and 96: WORKSHOP tion of the common metadat
- Page 97 and 98: ELECTRONIC PUBLISHING OF LEGISLATIO
- Page 99 and 100: WORKSHOP the working group has focu
- Page 101 and 102: WORKSHOP • the integrity of a rec
- Page 103 and 104: WORKSHOP Examples of different appr
- Page 105 and 106: WORKSHOP conidence uses certiicatio
- Page 107 and 108: WORKSHOP 3. LEGISLAtIVE ISSUES CONC
- Page 109 and 110: WORKSHOP signature, is only publish
- Page 111 and 112: WORKSHOP 3.2.4. ARE THERE ACTS, DEC
- Page 113 and 114: WORKSHOP Electronic signature of PD
- Page 115 and 116: WORKSHOP formats are available: htm
- Page 117 and 118: WORKSHOP the chain of conidence is
- Page 119 and 120: WORKSHOP the object of SOLON is to
- Page 121 and 122: WORKSHOP 5. A secure session is now
- Page 123 and 124: WORKSHOP ESTONIA A certiicate-based
- Page 125 and 126: WORKSHOP ertheless, some assistance
- Page 127 and 128: WORKSHOP (b) If the system is XmL-b
- Page 129 and 130: COHERENCE OF TERMINOLOGY AND SEARCH
- Page 131 and 132: WORKSHOP nym for legal categories,
- Page 133 and 134: WORKSHOP Article 4(2) of Directive
- Page 135 and 136: WORKSHOP the tool could prove to be
- Page 137 and 138: EUR-LEX: FROM DATA STRUCTURES TO LE
- Page 139 and 140: WORKSHOP duces a ‘magic result’
- Page 141 and 142: WORKSHOP sion of the current one, i
- Page 143 and 144: WORKSHOP for test and demonstration
- Page 145: WORKSHOP focus on text representati
- Page 149 and 150: WORKSHOP REfERENCES Bench-Capon, t.
- Page 151 and 152: TEXT MINING 1. INtRODUCtION the gro
- Page 153 and 154: WORKSHOP uments. the tasks and obje
- Page 155 and 156: WORKSHOP In order to create more ef
- Page 157 and 158: WORKSHOP jects. the problem, howeve
- Page 159 and 160: WORKSHOP space and their maintenanc
- Page 161 and 162: WORKSHOP the success of the impleme
- Page 163 and 164: WORKSHOP Thesauri thesauri are cont
- Page 165 and 166: WORKSHOP knowledge which are reusab
- Page 167 and 168: WORKSHOP fuhr, Norbert. 2004. Infor
- Page 169 and 170: WORKSHOP Oberle, Daniel; Staab, Ste
- Page 171: En tant que déléguée de la Grèc
- Page 175 and 176: PRESS REVIEW / REVUE DE PRESSE " 17
- Page 178 and 179: 01_2007_5222_txt_ML.indd 178 6-12-2
- Page 180: 01_2007_5222_txt_ML.indd 180 6-12-2
WORKSHOP<br />
As a irst step, the existing representation of relations should be restructured<br />
using URI style references. (Semi)automatic text extraction tools may<br />
help in inding references in the various documents. the structure of citations<br />
should then be improved, focusing on the main types of legal basis, amendments<br />
and repeals, preparatory acts and proposed modiications, case-law and<br />
literature. Relations should be represented with a graph, with the document in<br />
question in the centre and with arrows linking to boxes with the various types<br />
of citations. An eficient ranking algorithm should select the most important<br />
citations.<br />
while the additional metadata does not constitute a big problem and a<br />
more appropriate visualisation may be introduced quite easily, the ranking algorithm<br />
remains the biggest challenge. So far, the otherwise helpful weighting<br />
algorithms have not worked properly in a legal environment. however, a better<br />
structured visualisation of citations provides suficient value to the user in<br />
order to focus on this improvement and postpone the weighting algorithm for<br />
later implementation.<br />
LAyERS Of thE LEGAL OR<strong>DE</strong>R NAVIGAtOR<br />
A weak point of EUR-Lex is the missing (semi)automatic consolidation of<br />
legal acts. main documents, their amendments and corrections have to be consolidated<br />
by the user. Luckily, more and more acts are also available in a consolidated<br />
version. this work has greatly improved the availability of workable<br />
text versions; however, it requires a lot of resources.<br />
A restructuring of the text corpus would provide the basis for a<br />
(semi)automatic consolidation. the Austrian legal database RIS (Rechtsinformationssystem<br />
des Bundes) ( 12 ) could serve as a role model. In this database, the<br />
various laws are segmented into the subelements of sections, articles or annexes.<br />
the time of validity is stored per document segment. Standard searches<br />
also retrieve documents with a given date of validity, e.g. as a default value the<br />
day of searching.<br />
European documents are not as formally structured as Austrian laws but<br />
small adaptations will solve this problem. Recitals of the preamble could be<br />
treated like articles. A basic document would contain the title, legislative history<br />
and additional information like citations of the bundle of documents of a<br />
regulation or directive.<br />
( 12 ) website: http://www.ris.bka.gv.at.<br />
146 | 147<br />
01_2007_5222_txt_ML.indd 147 6-12-2007 15:14:03