Supporting Access to Online Legal Information: Semantic Strategies

To have access to legal information is a fundamental requirement for a variety of communities: ordinary citizens, scholars and legal professionals. Users of legal information belong to different categories and have various requirements and competencies. They use legal information for various purposes, and differences exist in the way such information is disseminated. To ensure access, commercial publishing is insufficient. In particular in the context of legal information the Internet promises to effect a radical transformation in the existing system of legal material. Legal producers and providers have made a great progress in placing legal materials on the web; these efforts have almost been too successful, as the legal researcher must now deal with an enormous amount of information spread across different servers. This huge amount of available legal information does not correspond to an enlargement of the right to access such sources as contents are not easily searchable. Therefore some ICT tools able to facilitate the retrieval of legal documents are to be adopted. This paper presents some semantic strategies, tools as well as methodologies developed within some EU and national Projects for specific types of legal information.