YEARS OF EUROPEAN ONLINE ANNÉES DE EN LIGNE ...

DOCUMENT ANALYSIS
AND LEGAL INFORMATION
Speaking in the framework of celebrating ‘25 years of EU law online’ offers
a most welcome opportunity to highlight some aspects of the daily work
of the EUR-Lex team that one might consider of some importance, in particular
for the end-users of EUR-Lex.
first, some emphasis will be laid on the system’s capacity to produce, in
response to a query, a well-deined set of documents, which is to be distinguished
from the rather simple search for only one particular reference.
Second, the multilingual nature of the system will be further elaborated
on. Presenting how the Eurovoc thesaurus and the classiication of the ‘Directory
of Community legislation in force’ can support the user in bridging the
shortcomings that a search for a natural language term in the full text of a
document can provide is of even more interest with regard to the multilingual
context of EUR-Lex.
MICHAEL DÜRO
Documentalist
in the EUR-Lex unit
of the Publications Office
1. SEARCh OPtIONS: A RESULtS PERSPECtIVE
It is, on this occasion, hardly possible to deliver the full picture of EUR-
Lex’s simple and advanced search options. the perspective chosen for this
presentation rather is to focus on two aspects by introducing two practical
examples.
1.1. Search options for a single document
the irst sample query illustrates the search for one, and only one, document.
the search for one single document is most conveniently performed by
using a unique identiier as search criterion. As such a means of unique identiication,
the EUR-Lex simple search offers the searches by document number
or by publication reference.
the heading ‘Search by document number’ covers the ‘natural number’ of
documents, e.g. a regulation or a COm document, together with the year. the
same criteria can be applied to a search for ‘consolidated texts’ under the same
heading.
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