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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/
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