In today's information society the processes of political, social and economic integration of European Union member states are causing a growing interest in exchanging legal information knowledge at national and trans-national levels. This trend calls for an improvement of the overall quality and accessibility of legal information within different legal systems. Several transformations are currently characterizing the scenario of legal information access, distribution and management: from the availability of legal documents in electronic formats as the main (and, in the next future, probably "official") source of legal information, to their availability on the Internet in a distributed environment. These trends are expecting support mainly from Semantic Web emerging technologies, promoted by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C (http://www.w3c.org)) , for a Web where not only information can be made accessible and understandable by humans but also understandable and processable by machines. These technologies aims at providing users with advanced services of information access and management. The actual implementation of Semantic Web technologies in large scale however is currently facing obstacles due to different reasons: on the one hand for the difficulties to come into an agreement in sharing general-purpose semantic models within the Internet communities, as well as the hardly scalable costs of their implementation; on the other hand for the efficacy of general purpose search and retrieval engines (like Google, Yahoo, etc.) which usually provide a valuable degree of satisfaction of users' information needs. However the legal domain, in particular the legislative one, has different characteristics, as well as legal users share peculiar information needs: - legislative documents have well defined features as far as their structure and semantics are concerned; - the legislative process, in particular the legislative documents production, is characterized by a well structured and defined workflow, which involves legislative offices in Parliaments and PAs; - legal information systems are not only aimed at providing advanced search and retrieval services to the users, but also at maintaining and upkeeping the legal order, at monitoring the impact of new norms on the legal order, at handling document timeline and versioning; - users are mainly interested in accessing norms rather than simply documents; they are particularly interested in knowing the relations between norms and having support to legal reasoning. In this context the use of document standards and Semantic Web technologies represents a pre-condition for the development of services oriented to legislators, to legal information providers as well as to legal experts. In this perspective EU member states and institutions have recently considered the use of Information and Communication Technologies in the legislative processes of paramount importance to foster the initiatives which aim at achieving better quality in legislation as well as improving legal information management, upkeeping and accessibility. Therefore a number of initiatives in the field of legislative document management have been taken. Such initiatives, promoted by national institutions, research and university institutes, defined standards for legislative documents identification as well as structural and semantic annotation, according to the W3C recommendations. These initiatives are mainly addressed: - to improve the quality and accessibility of legal information in different legal systems across the EU; - to promote the interoperability among applications and information systems managing legal information; - to provide high quality integrated services both for policy makers and citizens. Starting from national experiences, a pan-European initiative is currently running at CEN, the European Committee for Standardization, to provide a common framework for developing standards for legal information; this initiative is leading to an emerging and new European cooperation between member states as well as among different actors (data providers and publishers) in legal information management. In the wake of these activities, a parallel trend is raising, related to the development of software tools dealing with the specificities and the complexities of the established legal standards. They are addressed to support legislative drafting activities as well as the automatic (or semi-automatic) implementation of structural and semantic models for legislation. This volume contains the results of the most recent activities carried on in collaboration with colleagues at ITTIG-CNR in Florence, with CNIPA (Italian National Centre for Information Technology in Public Administration), CIRSFID (University of Bologna), the Leibniz Center for Law of the University of Amsterdam and other researchers of the Legislative XML community. It aims at giving an overview of the initiatives on legislative standards at national and European levels, as well as similar trends in extra-European countries, along with technical details of the various activities dealing with legal standards definition and development of tools for legislation.
Technologies for European Integration. Standards-based Interoperability of Legal Information Systems
Francesconi E
2007
Abstract
In today's information society the processes of political, social and economic integration of European Union member states are causing a growing interest in exchanging legal information knowledge at national and trans-national levels. This trend calls for an improvement of the overall quality and accessibility of legal information within different legal systems. Several transformations are currently characterizing the scenario of legal information access, distribution and management: from the availability of legal documents in electronic formats as the main (and, in the next future, probably "official") source of legal information, to their availability on the Internet in a distributed environment. These trends are expecting support mainly from Semantic Web emerging technologies, promoted by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C (http://www.w3c.org)) , for a Web where not only information can be made accessible and understandable by humans but also understandable and processable by machines. These technologies aims at providing users with advanced services of information access and management. The actual implementation of Semantic Web technologies in large scale however is currently facing obstacles due to different reasons: on the one hand for the difficulties to come into an agreement in sharing general-purpose semantic models within the Internet communities, as well as the hardly scalable costs of their implementation; on the other hand for the efficacy of general purpose search and retrieval engines (like Google, Yahoo, etc.) which usually provide a valuable degree of satisfaction of users' information needs. However the legal domain, in particular the legislative one, has different characteristics, as well as legal users share peculiar information needs: - legislative documents have well defined features as far as their structure and semantics are concerned; - the legislative process, in particular the legislative documents production, is characterized by a well structured and defined workflow, which involves legislative offices in Parliaments and PAs; - legal information systems are not only aimed at providing advanced search and retrieval services to the users, but also at maintaining and upkeeping the legal order, at monitoring the impact of new norms on the legal order, at handling document timeline and versioning; - users are mainly interested in accessing norms rather than simply documents; they are particularly interested in knowing the relations between norms and having support to legal reasoning. In this context the use of document standards and Semantic Web technologies represents a pre-condition for the development of services oriented to legislators, to legal information providers as well as to legal experts. In this perspective EU member states and institutions have recently considered the use of Information and Communication Technologies in the legislative processes of paramount importance to foster the initiatives which aim at achieving better quality in legislation as well as improving legal information management, upkeeping and accessibility. Therefore a number of initiatives in the field of legislative document management have been taken. Such initiatives, promoted by national institutions, research and university institutes, defined standards for legislative documents identification as well as structural and semantic annotation, according to the W3C recommendations. These initiatives are mainly addressed: - to improve the quality and accessibility of legal information in different legal systems across the EU; - to promote the interoperability among applications and information systems managing legal information; - to provide high quality integrated services both for policy makers and citizens. Starting from national experiences, a pan-European initiative is currently running at CEN, the European Committee for Standardization, to provide a common framework for developing standards for legal information; this initiative is leading to an emerging and new European cooperation between member states as well as among different actors (data providers and publishers) in legal information management. In the wake of these activities, a parallel trend is raising, related to the development of software tools dealing with the specificities and the complexities of the established legal standards. They are addressed to support legislative drafting activities as well as the automatic (or semi-automatic) implementation of structural and semantic models for legislation. This volume contains the results of the most recent activities carried on in collaboration with colleagues at ITTIG-CNR in Florence, with CNIPA (Italian National Centre for Information Technology in Public Administration), CIRSFID (University of Bologna), the Leibniz Center for Law of the University of Amsterdam and other researchers of the Legislative XML community. It aims at giving an overview of the initiatives on legislative standards at national and European levels, as well as similar trends in extra-European countries, along with technical details of the various activities dealing with legal standards definition and development of tools for legislation.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
