Towards a European Legal Data Cloud

The Open Data movement has gained momentum during the last year under the impulse of initiatives on government transparency carried on in different countries starting from the U.S. and the U.K. with the publication of the public data portals data.gov and data.gov.uk. Legal information has not much been interested by this phenomenon so far. We argue that the adoption of the linked data principles for publication of legal data, joined with existing efforts of standardization in the identification and representation of legal information, would open the way to a whole range of innovative legal services and applications based on top of a "Legal Data Cloud". A case study on relevant European legal datasets is presented.