From Information to Knowledge 1

M.A. Biasiotti and S. Faro (Eds.)

IOS Press, 2011
© 2011 The authors and IOS Press. All rights reserved.
doi:10.3233/978-1-60750-988-2-1

Introduction: Present and Future Trends of

Online Access to Legal Information
Maria Angela BIASIOTTI and Sebastiano FARO
ITTIG-CNR, Italy

Abstract. This paper introduces the topic of online access to legal information,
giving a brief overview of the historical process and of current debate, presenting
the contributions collected in the Volume.

Keywords. On line access to legal information.

1. Background

Looking at the current status of access to legal information by means of ICTs reveals
the gorgeous change done in almost 40 years.
In former days when legal information and documentation was based on the
traditional methods of paper collections and indexes, generally speaking until the early
1970s, the task of accessing legal information for all citizens was quite an impossible
mission. In this perspective it is sufficient to bear in mind that who was looking for a
specific piece of legal information should have had to physically move towards specific
sites where materials were collected (libraries, public buildings, and so forth) and to
count on specific background and expertise for identifying the right source where to
look for the requested information. Furthermore, from the institutional side, the
scenario was complicated by the perception of the publication of the law and of other
Copyright © 2011. IOS Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

legal sources more as a line of a formal duty than as the primary way for
communicating with the general public.
Within this context two main trends have greatly impacted on changing the
scenario: the technological developments, on one side, and the regulatory context on
the other side, recognizing specific importance to the real and effective information of
citizens.
As to the technological progress the use of ICTs in the legal information field has
been playing the role of “flywheel” enhancing locations and possibilities for accessing
legal information sources. From the first realisation of legislative informatics, which
goes back to the 1960’s when the first databases of legal documents were started till
now, the above mentioned barriers have been almost overcome. Everybody is able to
have access to legal information from everywhere just surfing the web. Tools and
facilities have been put in place for supporting users in searching, retrieving and
understanding legal information independently from their background. Profiting from
ICTs potentialities, legal informatics, academic researchers, public information
providers and private enterprises all together produced the on-going revolution in the
online access to legal information by means of not only theoretical models and theories,

From Information to Knowledge : Online Access to Legal Information: Methodologies, Trends and Perspectives, edited by M.A.
Biasiotti, and S. Faro, IOS Press, Incorporated, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/cuhk-ebooks/detail.action?docID=836219.
Created from cuhk-ebooks on 2020-11-02 01:49:19.
 2 M.A. Biasiotti and S. Faro / Introduction: Present and Future Trends

but, most of all, with concrete applications. These important steps also contributed to
prepare the floor for future improvements (legal information in the Web 3.0).
While this progress went live policies supporting this technological disclosure of
online information were implemented. As a significant step it is worthwhile to remind
the rise of the right to access to public documents as a fundamental citizenship right
and the online publication of legislation as the only one legally binding. Legal
information systems are currently included in the information policies of e-Government
so that disclosure of legal information by means of ICTs is to be considered as one of
the major goals to be reached by Public administrations towards citizens.
Actually, challenging today online access to legal information implies facing
various issues: semantic management of data, knowledge representation and modelling,
standardisation, web functionalities and interfaces, multilingualism, openness and
quality of data. Obviously, it is also to bear in mind that the management of data by
ICTs also implies relevant legal issue such as copyright on data and metadata,
privacy/anonymization. These issues become even more multi-faceted when facing the
different types of legal information: legislation, case law and legal authority. In turn,
each of these information types has its own specific features. Also their dissemination
implies different and peculiar problems, such as identifying the text in force at a given
time with reference to legislation or the relationship among different decisions with
reference to case law in order to understand if a given decision is (or is not) in
compliance with previous decisions on the same topic.

2. The Volume

Most of these issues are at stake in the present volume which arise after the Workshop
From Information to Knowledge, Online Access to legal Information, held in Florence
in May 2011 within the “Festival d’Europa” initiative. The workshop gathered experts
and research groups with experience and expertise in realizing effective access to
online legal information. The aim was at bringing together on the same table theories,
methodologies and experiences focusing on the realization of tools allowing access to
legal information via the Internet and on the relevance that this implies in relation with
Copyright © 2011. IOS Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

the exercise of the rights of citizenship.

The event was an occasion to present both theoretical approaches and results and
outcomes of realized and ongoing initiatives and projects enhancing the dissemination
and access to legal information. Thus the contributions collected in this book are a
faithful representation of the scenario going on at national, international and EU level
in the online access to legal information field, with a specific attention to the different
kind of legal information sources, from legislative information to legal scholarship.
The book, in its first part, includes contributions facing the issue from the
modelling and theoretical point of view.
Giovanni Sartor analyses implications of realizing the access to legislation in the
semantic web. He provides an overview of the context of the digitalization of
legislative information and its distribution on the semantic web and the management of
legislative documents outlining new needs, features and trends in accessing legislative
information. The author stresses the attention on the relevant role played by specific
tools such as standards and mark-up languages facing also advantages and inputs
deriving from their implementation into legislative, social and governance contexts.

From Information to Knowledge : Online Access to Legal Information: Methodologies, Trends and Perspectives, edited by M.A.
Biasiotti, and S. Faro, IOS Press, Incorporated, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/cuhk-ebooks/detail.action?docID=836219.
Created from cuhk-ebooks on 2020-11-02 01:49:19.
 M.A. Biasiotti and S. Faro / Introduction: Present and Future Trends 3

Els Breedstraet offers an overview of current scenario going on at EU level in the

EUR-Lex portal anticipating future trends and directions of this relevant official
information source. All changes and adjustments implemented in the new EUR-Lex
system, going live in 2012, are analysed focusing the attention on the user-friendliness,
accessing options, searching functionalities, personalization, interaction of other
websites and users.
Carol Tullo presents the UK best practice realized by the UK National Archives in
the implementation of the Legislation.gov.uk portal aiming at guaranteeing online
access to UK legislation on the web. The author sets out the approaches, strategies and
technologies that address these challenges for legislation.gov.uk.
Filippo Donati outlines the approach set down by the EU law with respect to the
access to legal documentation also taking in due consideration the EU Court of Justice
perspective. Specifically the author starts from the analysis of the effective existence of
the right of access in the Italian legal system. Then the scope of the right of access to
the documents of the European institutions is analysed in order to understand whether
this model can be invoked to overcome some restrictions that still characterize the right
of access in the Italian legal system.
Finally, Margherita Salvadori presents the evolution of the right to access in the
EU legal order with specific focus on the EU charter of fundamental rights.
The second part of this volume collects contributions on relevant initiatives and
projects willing to realize access to legal information from different approaches and
implementing different methodologies and tools.
Guido Boella and his colleagues present the Eunomos system, an integrated
Knowledge Management System that enables customers to find and understand the law
in their domain of interest by means of Web 3.0 technologies and the Internet of Things
approach. Authors argue that as the law gets more complex, conflicting, and ever-
changing, more advanced tools to make the law truly accessible are needed.
Knud Erik Petersen gives a wide overview of Lex Dania the XML-based system
used to transfer documents between the Danish Parliament and Government and to
promulgate those documents. The base is the Lex Dania XML schemas, the Lex Dania
Editor and the Lex Dania Client. This tools are briefly presented by the author who
mentions also future works to be done.
Copyright © 2011. IOS Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Bruno Bassi and Calogero Salamone present the COGITO system, an automated
classification system realized for the Library of the Italian Chamber of Deputies
compliant with the EuroVoc thesaurus. COGITO supports the cataloguing and
classification of parliamentary and legislative documents; each document is analyzed
and interpreted in order to then be archived quickly in the corresponding category, after
a validation by a human operator.
Melih Karakullukçu, Yeşim Eribol and Tuğba Karaer present the technical and
legal issues that an electronic legal search services has to face while dealing with the
problem of missing, unreliable or quasi-official legal data. Moreover the initiatives
carried on by the authors to make more legal texts available electronically in Turkey
from the official hand that produced these texts and actions are presented.
Marc Van Opijnen sets the attention on the recent initiative of the EU Council of
Ministers inviting the introduction of the European Case law identifier (ECLI) and a
minimum set of uniform metadata for case law, as an indispensable asset for legal
information retrieval. After considering public access to case law in general, the paper
discusses the need for a European system for the identification of judicial decisions and
the rationale behind the basic components of the chosen solution. The author directly

From Information to Knowledge : Online Access to Legal Information: Methodologies, Trends and Perspectives, edited by M.A.
Biasiotti, and S. Faro, IOS Press, Incorporated, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/cuhk-ebooks/detail.action?docID=836219.
Created from cuhk-ebooks on 2020-11-02 01:49:19.
 4 M.A. Biasiotti and S. Faro / Introduction: Present and Future Trends

involved in the workgroup elaborating this standard presents features, benefits and
future applications of ECLI.
Giovanni Damele and his colleagues present a project for the investigation of the
argumentative techniques adopted in the judgements of the Italian Constitutional Court
is presented. Authors provide a taxonomy of the argumentation techniques, introduce
the representation of judgements and outline the system to annotate judgements with
arguments and to query the annotated corpus.
Meritxell Fernandez-Barrera and Danièle Bourcier make a reflexion on Knowledge
reuse as a major asset in the development of semantic resources (ontologies, thesauri,
terminologies, knowledge bases) and semantically enriched datasets, namely annotated
corpora. Reusing available resources reduces indeed production costs and enables to
test the validity of models in different applicative contexts. However, sharing and
reusing existing resources is sometimes hindered by intellectual property limitations
and uncertainties, as well as by privacy concerns depending on the nature of the data.
Graham Greenleaf and Ginevra Peruginelli present a new initiative called
“EuroLII”, as an umbrella project capable to give comprehensive free access to legal
information in Europe, by providing a single search facility for databases hosted in
European legal information institutes.
Finally, Paolo Guarda analyses the state of the art of the different types of Open
Archives used by the legal scholars and identifies the key features of a possible, future
open repository dedicated to the Italian legal literature.

3. Conclusions

The reflection on the current status of access to legal information by means of ICTs
functionalities implies a ponderation of the achievement reached in 40 years of activity
from different perspectives.
First of all, a lot has been done and produced: the disclosure of legal information is
in every country and at European level a key point of the political agenda. Policies
encourage the openness and transparency of public information and the open data
movement is the core of the current scenario.
Copyright © 2011. IOS Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Legislation is everywhere accessible on the web for free and tools able to facilitate
searches are present in almost systems even if some of them do not implement
advanced functionalities. Whilst legislation has reached this level of progress the same
did not happen for case law and legal literature which in many contexts still remain
hardly accessible.
Anyhow, as it arises there are relevant best practices, such as Legislation.gov.uk
and the EUR-Lex portal, giving access to legal information supporting search
functionalities with advanced tools such as metadata, cross references and thematic
links facilitating the task to the general public of stakeholders independently from their
professional background.
By way of concluding the overall impression is that new challenges are ready to be
addressed. On the one hand, the scenario is almost ready to open up and disclose also
those sources of legal information remaining reserved for few. On the other hand, it
arises that activities for transforming information (i.e., data that has been given
meaning by way of relational connection) into knowledge (i.e., information connected
in relationships) are moving rapidly in many useful directions all contributing to bridge
the gap between citizens and legal information.

From Information to Knowledge : Online Access to Legal Information: Methodologies, Trends and Perspectives, edited by M.A.
Biasiotti, and S. Faro, IOS Press, Incorporated, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/cuhk-ebooks/detail.action?docID=836219.
Created from cuhk-ebooks on 2020-11-02 01:49:19.