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Knowing the Law as a Prerequisite to Participative eGovernment: The Role of Semantic Technologies

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Empowering Open and Collaborative Governance

Abstract

Active participation of EU citizens to their national and local decision-making process can only occur once they have a full knowledge of the transnational and national regulatory and institutional context. Despite their actual right to access legal documents, several barriers still prevent citizen against getting a true understanding of the effects brought about by normative changes and regulatory innovations. Linguistic and conceptual complexity of the legal domain is combined with technical barriers, and the availability of satisfactory, complete and reliable information services for legal experts and non-experts has still to come. This chapter focuses on the role ICT and, more specifically, semantic technologies play in providing powerful tools for bridging the gap between the two layers, that is, the formal and the conceptual aspects of legal knowledge, by guaranteeing not only formal access to the sources of the law but substantial knowledge of its content as well.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    “What is needed in forensic linguistics’ comprehensibility research is the following: a. A method to model the meaning (the semantics) of a text […] b. Text meaning representations must be automated. For practical reasons, we need a software tool, as lawyers and laymen shall also use comprehensibility tests. c. Inferences and interactions with connected pieces of knowledge must be shown […]. If expert knowledge is indispensable, the model must indicate it. d. The model must be empirically validated. It is necessary that psycholinguistic tests determining individual comprehension shape the model” (Rathert 2006). The quality of public documents is the object of the Plain English Campaign (http://www.plainenglish.co.uk), now extended to other languages than English.

  2. 2.

    Annex A of the Council Decision 2009/316/JHA of 6 April 2009 on the establishment of the European Criminal Records Information System (ECRIS) in application of Article 11 of Framework Decision 2009/315/JHA.

  3. 3.

    Initiatives on adoption of XML standards for the representation of legislative document structures and metadata have been brought on at both national and international levels in different countries in recent years. To cite the most successful, XML.gov in the USA and Crown XML Schema in the UK provide the most rich and complete datasets made available by governments in open XML. Other initiatives in European countries, like NIR (NormeInRete) standard in Italy or Metalex in the Netherlands, have also led to further development for a pan African standard (AkomaNtoso) and to the international initiative of Metalex/CEN global interchange standard of legal sources.

  4. 4.

    Eurlex document: A6-2008-0224.

  5. 5.

    SPOCS Deliverable D1.1 & D1.2, Survey of Syndication Solutions & Multilingualism, 2010, p. 29 http://www.eu-spocs.eu Accessed 18 Sep 2011.

  6. 6.

    Depending on the legal contexts, ‘prescrizione’ means ‘prescription’, ‘provision’ or ‘expiration of a right’.

  7. 7.

    Some examples include Functional Ontology of Law (Valente et al. 1999), LRI-Core (Breuker et al. 2005), Core Legal Ontology (Gangemi 2003) and LKIF-Core (Breuker et al. 2008).

  8. 8.

    By empirical evidence we refer here to the fact that concepts count with linguistic manifestations detected in domain relevant texts and can thus be expected to be part of the expert model of the domain.

  9. 9.

    For extensive reviews of currently available tools for terminology extraction and the domains to which they have been applied, see (Jacquemin and Bourigault 2003; Cabré et al. 2001).

  10. 10.

    http://www.dalosproject.eu (eParticipation 2006).

  11. 11.

    The tools specifically designed for processing English and other EU language texts are the already mentioned T2K and GATE. GATE owned and maintained by the Department of Computer Science of the University of Sheffield supports advanced language analysis, data visualisation and information sharing in many languages. GATE has facilities for viewing, editing and annotating corpora in a wide number of languages (based on Unicode) and has been used successfully for the creation, semi-automatic annotation and analysis of many electronic resources. It contains many modules for the annotation of textual material, such as parts of speech information, lemmatisation, conceptual indexing and semantic annotation.

  12. 12.

    The domain chosen as a case study in DALOS is consumer protection; the corpus is composed by 16 EU directives, 33 European Court of Justice judgments and 9 Court of First Instance judgments.

  13. 13.

    See http://www.w3.org/TR/wordnet-rdf/ Accessed 16 Sep 2011.

  14. 14.

    Web 2.0 can be generally described as an interactive Internet in which users not only consume but produce online content. Web 3.0 corresponds generally to the Semantic Web, namely, rendering accessible to the computer the semantics of documents.

  15. 15.

    Laymen terminology was extracted from a diachronic corpus of around 10,000 questions and 20,000 complaints that have been addressed by consumers to the Catalan Consumer Agency from 2007 to 2010. Complex terms were extracted on the basis of morphosyntactic patterns (Fernández-Barrera and Casanovas 2011).

  16. 16.

    http://www.data.gov Accessed 20 Sep 2011.

  17. 17.

    http://data.worldbank.org Accessed 20 Sep 2011.

  18. 18.

    http://www.data.gov/communities/law Accessed 20 Sep 2011.

  19. 19.

    The site makes available datasets beyond traditional legal sources and with different legal value, such as administrative decisions, case filings, legal interpretations and agency directives (http://www.data.gov/communities/law).

  20. 20.

    It is not yet clear how the tasks of publishing raw data and developing applications for consuming them will be distributed among private and public actors. Some authors have proposed that governments should limit their role to the publication of open data in easily reusable formats so that private parties can concentrate their efforts in the development of advanced applications for consuming data in a tailored way (Robinson et al. 2009).

  21. 21.

    On the different aspects of open access to information (economic, legal and technical open access), see Dulong de Rosnay (2010).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Istituto di Teoria e Tecniche per l’Informazione Giuridica (ITTIG-CNR), Via dè’ Barucci 20, 50127, Firenze, Italy

    Daniela Tiscornia

  2. CERSA, Université Panthéon Assas, rue Thénard 10, 75005, Paris, France

    Meritxell Fernández-Barrera

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  1. Daniela Tiscornia
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  2. Meritxell Fernández-Barrera
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Correspondence to Daniela Tiscornia .

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  1. , Information Systems Laboratory, University of the Aegean, Lymperis Building, Karlovassi, Samos, 83200, Greece

    Yannis Charalabidis

  2. , Decision Support Systems Laboratory (DSS, National Technical University of Athens, Iroon Polytechneiou 9 Str., Athens, 15773, Greece

    Sotirios Koussouris

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Tiscornia, D., Fernández-Barrera, M. (2012). Knowing the Law as a Prerequisite to Participative eGovernment: The Role of Semantic Technologies. In: Charalabidis, Y., Koussouris, S. (eds) Empowering Open and Collaborative Governance. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27219-6_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27219-6_7

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