On the Future of Legal Publishing Services in the Semantic Web

The development of the Semantic Web represents an essential precondition to the definition of new scenarios for the future Internet. This perspective is of particular interest in the legal information domain for the specialized nature of legal information and the peculiarities of the legal users' information needs. In this paper, the evolution in recent years of the Semantic Web in the legal domain is reviewed, with particular emphasis to the most recent developments related to Linked Open Data initiative and to the role, in the legal Semantic Web, of the Publications Office of the European Union in its two-fold role of public institution and legal publisher.