1 Caselex: an e-Government Application favouring Interoperability Roberta Nannucci ITTIG/CNR Supported by the European Commission

2 Mission and target groups One-stop-shop for international and national case law of use across borders for legal professionals

3 What will Caselex bring to the legal practice? Easy to use Internet based research assistant to access all important cross-border case law from Europe relevant to legal professionals’ work in commercial areas of law without need for multilingual and multinational legal skills –Common denominator: European Community law and international law National scope before CaselexEuropean scope after Caselex

4 Legal Pro’s core brings key cases without need for multilingual and multinational legal skills Court cases from national Supreme and higher/special courts linked to European Community law –Aim to cover all EU and EFTA States –Will also cover European Court of Justice and Court of First Instance, next to the EFTA Court of Justice Commercial areas of law starting point –Competition law, Company law, IPR, Labour law, Consumer law, Banking, etc Up to date on, and timely delivery of, current cases – new cases yearly –Will steadily add historical cases –Archive contains currently 250+ cases

5 Modular service Core module is initial starting point of Caselex –Cases within commercial areas of law from supreme and higher/special courts Additional modules to be rolled out successively 1.Competition authorities 2.Lower and regional courts 3.Market councils and authorities 4.Sectorial authorities

6 Added value content and services Enriched content –Full text decision in native language with possibility for translation on demand –Multilingual headnote and summary on all full text cases Written by legal professionals for legal professionals Summary to act as informative teaser to procure Translation on Demand –All cases classified according to multilingual thesaurus Knowledge explorer: Browse and search –Simple and advanced search –Drill down browsing Multiple entry doors when browsing and searching –Area of law (based on multilingual thesaurus), Country, National law & provisions, EC law Multilingual services and content –Aim is English, French, Spanish, German, Italian

7 Caselex metadata set Metadata are “data about data” or “information about information” allowing contents/raw materials to be added with extra values Descriptive Administrative –Rights management metadata –Preservation metadata Structural

8 Caselex metadata set: a structural view groupsdefinitions Contentmetadata relevant to the decision content; extracted or inferred by analysing the decision Cross-referencingmetadata relevant to cited or citing acts Contextadded information providing instruments to better comprehend the decision Administrationinformation concerning the Caselex documents management

9 Caselex metadata set: Content CountryAliasEnglish headnotes CourtLinguistic versionFrench Headnotes Chamber of the Court Language of the original version Summary Type Language of the translated version English summary DateArea of lawFrench summary NumberSubjectDissenting opinion PartiesHeadnotesCaselex idenfifier

10 Caselex metadata set: Cross-referencing EC ProvisionLaw cited National ProvisionCaselaw cited Date of national provisionCited by case

11 Caselex metadata set: Administration ProviderRightsDate of acquisition Author of the translation Status of the documentDate of publication Author of the original summary Format of Caselex document Author of metadata Translator of the English summary Publisher Data and time of metadata editing Translator of the French summary Local disseminator Available linguistic versions

12 Caselex metadata set: a functional view aimselementsoutcomes Identifying case law document court, number, date....Simple search Identifying case law content summary, headnotes, area of law, subject Advanced search Identifying relationship with other case law documents (through content map) EC provision, national provision, case law cited, law cited Advanced search Managing Caselex repository author of metadata, right, translation... Well organised management of Caselex

13 Thesaurus: Challenges Structured list of expressions for representing the conceptual content of documents in a documentary system Descriptors Non-descriptors Semantic relationships –Equivalence –Hierarchical –Associative Semantic ambiguityMultilinguism Synonimity and homonymityCorrespondence between concepts expressed in different language (Legal domain)

14 Caselex Thesaurus Background Legal thesaurus and multilingual thesaurus –consideration of Caselex nature and the origin of the documentation –conceptualization of contents –rendering such contents into different language –exploitation and re-use of existing sources existing multilingual thesauri (Eurovoc, LOIS, Eclas) relevant to Caselex as they offer: information on structuring contents, suggestions on methodology and good inputs for further developments information extraction from EC law texts advanced multilingual vocabulary of keywords on EU law

15 Key Criteria and Outcome Methodology for implementing Caselex Thesaurus considering Requirements –for the end-user - ease of use –from the editing point of view - sufficient communication skills able to represent case contents –from the Consortium point of view - availability of linguistic resources from the beginning Answer Creation of a multilingual thesaurus specifically built up according to the nature of the documents (case law) in the meanwhile based on existing widespread multilingual sources dealing with EU law

16 Methodology for Building up Caselex Thesaurus A) Building the first layer: the hierarchical structure identifying significant descriptors for each area of law relevant to Caselex (concepts involved application of EU provisions and able to describe each area at different layers of specificity giving the hierarchical structure and organization to these descriptors classifying the most general term as “Top Term” (TT) and the most specific ones linked to each Narrower Term (NT) into 2 different levels (NT1 and NT2). From the list of descriptors…….to the thesaurus Area of law: Intellectual Property Right=Sector: Intellectual Property General concept relating to this area: Industrial property =TT Copyright Specific concept related to Industrial property: Trademark =NT1 Trademark More specific concept related to Industrial property and Trademark: Domain name =NT2 Domain name

17 Methodology for Building up Caselex Thesaurus B) Multilinguality Starting list of descriptors comes out only in English need to adapt it to Caselex multilingual features rendering each descriptors into other languages (FR, ES, IT,DE, DA, LT) without loosing the significance of the concept Solution offered by multilingual official sources avalaible at EU level Eurovoc, Eurodicautom, Scadplus, other specific glossaries, headings of cases of the ECJ published in Eur-Lex and ECJ website

18 Methodology for Building up Caselex Thesaurus C) Extensibility Finalize Thesaurus by structuring the other relationship (equivalence and associative) for describing deeply and in a more precise way Caselex documents contents needs a further selection of descriptors and non-descriptors arising from data and information existing in the Caselex repository Legal concepts emerging from headnotes and summaries edited by Caselex editorial staff

19 Methodology for Building up Caselex Thesaurus D) Present status Considering contents and resources Caselex is up to multilinguality step since extensibility needs to have the repository quite complete for extracting a significant number of descriptors and non-descriptors Future developments reeingeneering the thesaurus structure, transforming the terminology organization into a knowledge organization 1. identifying additional descriptor sources and enriching the knowledge structure management through conceptual relations semantically specialized (Semantic lexicons); 2. enriching the knowledge structure management through conceptual relations semantically formally defined (Formal ontologies)

20 Caselex Reference Caselex website