Technologies for European Integration. Standards-based Interoperability of Legal Information Systems

In today's information society the processes of political, social and economic integration of European Union member states are causing a growing interest in exchanging legal information knowledge at national and trans-national levels. This trend calls for an improvement of the overall quality and accessibility of legal information within different legal systems. Several transformations are currently characterizing the scenario of legal information access, distribution and management: from the availability of legal documents in electronic formats as the main (and, in the next future, probably "official") source of legal information, to their availability on the Internet in a distributed environment. These trends are expecting support mainly from Semantic Web emerging technologies, promoted by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C (http://www.w3c.org)) , for a Web where not only information can be made accessible and understandable by humans but also understandable and processable by machines. These technologies aims at providing users with advanced services of information access and management. The actual implementation of Semantic Web technologies in large scale however is currently facing obstacles due to different reasons: on the one hand for the difficulties to come into an agreement in sharing general-purpose semantic models within the Internet communities, as well as the hardly scalable costs of their implementation; on the other hand for the efficacy of general purpose search and retrieval engines (like Google, Yahoo, etc.) which usually provide a valuable degree of satisfaction of users' information needs. However the legal domain, in particular the legislative one, has different characteristics, as well as legal users share peculiar information needs: - legislative documents have well defined features as far as their structure and semantics are concerned; - the legislative process, in particular the legislative documents production, is characterized by a well structured and defined workflow, which involves legislative offices in Parliaments and PAs; - legal information systems are not only aimed at providing advanced search and retrieval services to the users, but also at maintaining and upkeeping the legal order, at monitoring the impact of new norms on the legal order, at handling document timeline and versioning; - users are mainly interested in accessing norms rather than simply documents; they are particularly interested in knowing the relations between norms and having support to legal reasoning. In this context the use of document standards and Semantic Web technologies represents a pre-condition for the development of services oriented to legislators, to legal information providers as well as to legal experts. In this perspective EU member states and institutions have recently considered the use of Information and Communication Technologies in the legislative processes of paramount importance to foster the initiatives which aim at achieving better quality in legislation as well as improving legal information management, upkeeping and accessibility. Therefore a number of initiatives in the field of legislative document management have been taken. Such initiatives, promoted by national institutions, research and university institutes, defined standards for legislative documents identification as well as structural and semantic annotation, according to the W3C recommendations. These initiatives are mainly addressed: - to improve the quality and accessibility of legal information in different legal systems across the EU; - to promote the interoperability among applications and information systems managing legal information; - to provide high quality integrated services both for policy makers and citizens. S