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YEARS OF EUROPEAN ONLINE ANNÉES DE EN LIGNE ...

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As EU law is more complex, different types of applicability have to be<br />

developed, in particular on the validity and the direct applicability of the act.<br />

As the work for restructuring such a huge database as EUR-Lex is quite high, a<br />

(semi)automatic solution has to be developed in order to pursue this approach.<br />

Additional research is necessary for deining the various layers of validity and<br />

applicability.<br />

tERmINOLOGy<br />

At present, four instruments of terminology are available in EUR-Lex: the<br />

Eurovoc thesaurus, classiication headings, subject matters and case-law directory<br />

code. the best legal quality can be found in the case-law directory code.<br />

quite useful classes of legislation are available with the classiication headings.<br />

the Eurovoc thesaurus has its usefulness in general searching. however, weaknesses<br />

are evident in legal searches due to an insuficient number of legal concepts.<br />

thus, Eurovoc should be extended with a lexical ontology that contains<br />

the required high number of legal terms. A conceptual structure must also be<br />

developed for these terms. Such an instrument would greatly improve linguistic<br />

support for searching. Deinitions of and relations between the concepts<br />

would help lay users and less-experienced lawyers. Such a terminology could<br />

be used for a reinement of queries, cross-linguistic retrieval and a multipurpose<br />

dictionary.<br />

So far, lexical ontologies on European law have been limited to speciic<br />

purposes (e.g. the LOIS project). A full-scale lexical ontology would require a<br />

high level of resources that need a stronger focus of lawyers on terminology<br />

questions. thus, hopes rest on (semi)automatic analysis in order to extract the<br />

suficient number of concepts from a representative text corpus.<br />

CONCLUSIONS<br />

today, EUR-Lex is an excellent text provider but an insuficient metacontent<br />

provider. the main reason is that legal ontologies are insuficiently<br />

developed for such a large application. It is not advisable to move immediately<br />

to a full-scale legal ontology. Intermediate steps are very helpful and much<br />

easier to take. Examples are the described navigators: legislative/juridical, citations,<br />

layers of the legal order and terminology.<br />

01_2007_5222_txt_ML.indd 148 6-12-2007 15:14:03

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