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Caselex: an e-Government Application favouring

Interoperability

Roberta NannucciITTIG/CNR

Supported by theEuropean Commission

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Mission and target groups

One-stop-shop for international and national case lawof use across borders for legal professionals

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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 Caselex European scope after Caselex

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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

– 1300-1500 new cases yearly– Will steadily add historical cases– Archive contains currently 250+ cases

Area of law

Case law map

Court case repository

Community law

Member State X law

Member State Y law

Law link look-up and case

macthing

Court case 1, Member State X

Court case 2, Member State Y

Court case n, Member State Z

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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

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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

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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

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Caselex metadata set: a structural view

groups definitions

Content metadata relevant to the decision content; extracted or inferred by analysing the decision

Cross-referencing metadata relevant to cited or citing acts

Context added information providing instruments to better comprehend the decision

Administration information concerning the Caselex documents management

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Caselex metadata set: Content

Country Alias English headnotes

Court Linguistic version French Headnotes

Chamber of the CourtLanguage of the original version

Summary

TypeLanguage of the translated version

English summary

Date Area of law French summary

Number Subject Dissenting opinion

Parties Headnotes Caselex idenfifier

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Caselex metadata set: Cross-referencing

EC Provision Law cited

National Provision Caselaw cited

Date of national provision Cited by case

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Caselex metadata set: Administration

Provider Rights Date of acquisition

Author of the translation

Status of the document Date of publication

Author of the original summary

Format of Caselex document

Author of metadata

Translator of the English summary

PublisherData and time of metadata editing

Translator of the French summary

Local disseminatorAvailable linguistic versions

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Caselex metadata set: a functional view

aims elements outcomes

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

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Thesaurus: ChallengesStructured list of expressions for representing the conceptual content of documents in a documentary system

•Descriptors•Non-descriptors•Semantic relationships

– Equivalence– Hierarchical– Associative

Semantic ambiguity Multilinguism

Synonimity and homonymity Correspondence between concepts expressed in different language

(Legal domain)

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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

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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 thenature of the documents (case law) in the meanwhile based on existingwidespread multilingual sources dealing with EU law

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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

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Methodology for Building up Caselex Thesaurus

B) MultilingualityStarting list of descriptors comes out only in English

need to adapt it to Caselex multilingual features rendering each descriptorsinto other languages (FR, ES, IT,DE, DA, LT) without loosing thesignificance of the concept

Solution offered by multilingual official sources avalaible at EU level Eurovoc,Eurodicautom, Scadplus, other specific glossaries, headings of casesof the ECJ published in Eur-Lex and ECJ website

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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

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Methodology for Building up Caselex Thesaurus

D) Present statusConsidering contents and resources Caselex is up to multilingualitystep since extensibility needs to have the repository quite complete forextracting a significant number of descriptors and non-descriptors

Future developmentsreeingeneering the thesaurus structure, transforming the terminologyorganization into a knowledge organization1. 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)

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Caselex Reference

Caselex website

http://www.caselex.com/