View Partner Search: PS-IT-2365
PROPOSAL AT A GLANCE
Proposal name:
European Advanced System for everYday Life Application of legal-knoWledge (EASYLAW)
Subject:
The Information Society is becoming more and more complex, thus European and national lawmakers have to regulate a growing number of issues. As a result, legal texts (laws, decisions, interpretations, etc.) are intricate, numerous and difficult to link; besides, there is divergence among courts’ decisions as well as among the lawyers’ interpretations of them. Furthermore, laws are written using legal terms that are hardly understandable for the average citizen and different interpretations are often made. These barriers to legal knowledge lead to huge costs for EU citizens because they need professionals' advices even to solve simple real life cases, because laws are neither easy to find nor to understand. Even if many legal texts are available on the web, their retrieval is not easy, due to the large amount of data and to the fact that they are published on thousands of web pages, forums, newsgroups, social networks, etc. Once a law has been found, besides a reader without specific legal background cannot tell if the text is either updated or error free.
However, despite recent research advances, there are no operational systems in existence which solve these problems. What has never been targeted, furthermore, is a system that draws legal content from multiple domains and makes it available to EU citizens, ensuring at the same time compliance with intellectual property rights and data protection rules.
However, despite recent research advances, there are no operational systems in existence which solve these problems. What has never been targeted, furthermore, is a system that draws legal content from multiple domains and makes it available to EU citizens, ensuring at the same time compliance with intellectual property rights and data protection rules.
PROJECT DESCRIPTION
Proposal Outline:
The aim of the project is to develop an innovative tool which will combine different legal texts (laws, decisions, interpretations, etc.) - both on "traditional" web and semantic web - and will produce a personalised result based on user's queries, enabling dynamic user, context and device adaptation. The "final" result will be an advanced aggregation of the relevant texts. This system will be even more innovative because it will to avoid copyright violations and ensure data protection. In fact, it will show directly to the user authorised content (e.g., texts released under Creative Commons license, etc.) and it will link content that cannot be shared under its specific use license. The project will reduce costs of legal advices and litigations and will offer new ways to understand laws and regulations, thus offering to EU citizens a faster way to access legal norms and be aware of how they should be applied. This system may also be a framework for future evolutions, thanks to its support for semantic web technologies.
Components:
- legal crawler: legal texts (laws, interpretations, cases and decisions) are written with specialized terms and different period construction methods both at internal level (between them) and external level (if compared with "real life" texts). Current crawlers are not specialized in the legal domain, thus the ratio between provided results and useful results is not sufficient to provide correct information. The legal crawler will be able to select only the relevant texts according to the user preferences.
- legal aggregation engine: Data need to be elaborated in order to provide useful knowledge to the user. In fact, "raw" legal texts are neither easily understandable nor combinable. This is due to their particular nature and heterogeneity. The legal aggregation engine will combine data provided by the crawler adapting them to the user's query. For instance, on a specific tax law topic, this engine will produce new knowledge by showing: the specific article (s) of the tax law; relevant courts' decisions legal experts' interpretations and possible real cases. Among these pieces of information, the aggregator engine will select only the relevant part of each document (for example, the summary of a decision or an excerpt of an interpretation). This engine will be law abiding because it will directly show documents which can be displayed according to their license, while it will link external content if this cannot be copied or shared. Thus, a potential EU citizen will be able to understand what he or she should do without the need to be a legal expert or to consult one. Users' preferences will be used to produce a digital legal repository which will be automatically updated: in fact, if many users query the system with similar questions, then they will be shown as an advanced FAQ that will be guide EU citizens in the law domain.
Components:
- legal crawler: legal texts (laws, interpretations, cases and decisions) are written with specialized terms and different period construction methods both at internal level (between them) and external level (if compared with "real life" texts). Current crawlers are not specialized in the legal domain, thus the ratio between provided results and useful results is not sufficient to provide correct information. The legal crawler will be able to select only the relevant texts according to the user preferences.
- legal aggregation engine: Data need to be elaborated in order to provide useful knowledge to the user. In fact, "raw" legal texts are neither easily understandable nor combinable. This is due to their particular nature and heterogeneity. The legal aggregation engine will combine data provided by the crawler adapting them to the user's query. For instance, on a specific tax law topic, this engine will produce new knowledge by showing: the specific article (s) of the tax law; relevant courts' decisions legal experts' interpretations and possible real cases. Among these pieces of information, the aggregator engine will select only the relevant part of each document (for example, the summary of a decision or an excerpt of an interpretation). This engine will be law abiding because it will directly show documents which can be displayed according to their license, while it will link external content if this cannot be copied or shared. Thus, a potential EU citizen will be able to understand what he or she should do without the need to be a legal expert or to consult one. Users' preferences will be used to produce a digital legal repository which will be automatically updated: in fact, if many users query the system with similar questions, then they will be shown as an advanced FAQ that will be guide EU citizens in the law domain.
Keywords:
Keywords
- personalization
- aggregation
- intelligent systems
- legal texts
- knowledge management systems
- license
- privacy
- IPR
- personalization
- aggregation
- intelligent systems
- legal texts
- knowledge management systems
- license
- privacy
- IPR
PARTNER PROFILE SOUGHT
Required skills and Expertise:
- academic or research partner (profile 1)
- academic, research or commercial partner with expertise on crawling and semantic web technologies (profile 2)
- academic, research or commercial partner (profile 3)
- academic, research or commercial partner (profile 4)
- end users (communities, associations) (profile 5)
- academic, research or commercial partner with expertise on crawling and semantic web technologies (profile 2)
- academic, research or commercial partner (profile 3)
- academic, research or commercial partner (profile 4)
- end users (communities, associations) (profile 5)
Description of work to be carried out by the partner(s) sought:
- study of new aggregation method focused on legal texts (profile 1)
- development of the legal crawler (profile 2)
- development of the tool for the legal analysis of content (profile 3)
- development of the legal aggregation engine (profile 4)
- validation of the system (profile 5)
- development of the legal crawler (profile 2)
- development of the tool for the legal analysis of content (profile 3)
- development of the legal aggregation engine (profile 4)
- validation of the system (profile 5)
Type of partner(s) sought:
• Industrial partners (Profiles 1, 2, 3)
• Research partners (Profiles 1, 3)
• Social networks, consumers’ associations (Profile 3)
• Public Administration (Profile 3)
• Courts, Law Firms, lawyers’ associations (Profile 4)
• Research partners (Profiles 1, 3)
• Social networks, consumers’ associations (Profile 3)
• Public Administration (Profile 3)
• Courts, Law Firms, lawyers’ associations (Profile 4)
The Proposer is looking for a Coordinator:
No
PROPOSER INFORMATION
Organisation:
University of Bologna
Department:
Faculty of Law
Type of Organisation:
University
Country:
Italy
