Accesso all'informazione giuridica e nuove tecnologie

The article analyses legal information access status quo in the Semantic Web era where the trend is to is to make web content machine-processable in order to develop new functionalities beyond the mere display of data such as enabling a better access to relevant information contained in web documents. Actually one of the main problems of the WWW is information overload and the limited software performance in extracting useful information for users . The situation in the legal domain follows the general trend, for legal information of different types (authoritative sources but also case law and legal doctrine) is moving into the Web and therefore legal professionals and citizens as well are exposed to information overload. This risk is even higher nowadays when there exists a trend to abandoning traditional on paper sources and accessing legal information online. In this framework, the benefits of shortening the time and space barriers for finding legal information can indeed be hindered by the excess and the unreliability of materials provided in electronic format. It is thus desirable to develop improved techniques for accessing quickly not only relevant documents, but the bits of information embedded in them that specifically match the user queries. t becomes therefore a pressing need to enable a more efficient access to reliable and useful legal knowledge. In order to bridge the gap and to overcome barriers the author proposes to implement the semantic web vision in the legal domain in order to satisfy the above mentioned need rendering legal content machine-processable.