Challenges for European legal information retrieval
Virpi Lyytikäinen, Pasi Tiitinen, Airi Salminen · 2003
Internationalisation and the expansion of the European Union have created a situation where the need for legal information from foreign countries and from different legislative levels is greater than ever before. This information is increasingly becoming available in digital form due to the increase in legal information repositories on the Internet. In spite of this, users of European legal information encounter multitude of problems in information retrieval. The information is scattered in numerous databases in which documents are organised and classified in different ways, their contents are written in different languages, and the functionality and user interfaces of the databases differ. Moreover the differences in legal systems greatly hinder the use of European legal information. The problems related to the retrieval of legal information in Europe have been studied in a project called EULEGIS. The main purpose of the project is to offer a consistent user interface to retrieve legal information created in different legal systems and at different levels in Europe – the European Union, a member state, a region, or a municipality. In the EULEGIS interface, information about the context of legal documents is given to users by graphical data models. In the paper we discuss the problems related to the complexity of the legal domain and solutions developed in the EULEGIS project.