I’m working at the publishing house of the austrian unions federation and that’s how I hit across legal informatics. We publis information about labour legislation for employees and their representatives – print and online (klick on „Demozugang“ or enter „lexml“ / „lexml“). So I got two questions:
- How can we publish efficiently legal information from different sources, which is badly structured and not at all standardized?
- How can we make this information findable and understandable not only for the experts but also for these, who are subjected to the laws?
I hope for some help from information technology and science – not only by applying tools but more by implementing methods and proceedures.
I’m not a jurist, but studied economics and worked for some years at a newspaper publishing house, tranfoming the paper archive into an state of the art information research center. Thus I experienced, that there are quite different cultures in the business and the legal information sector. The latter isn’t the sector of early adopters. This might give us the chance to learn from the succes and errors of others.
Filed under: Allgemein, introduction
wachter.blog 
Hi Christian:
Thanks for starting this blog.
I had a bit of difficulty following your demo, since I only studied Scientific German, and that many, many years ago.
I think that to allow different groups of people to access the data, you need a „synonym“ function built into your search algorithm. I think you can get a good result without having to construct a whole formal „ontology“. A good start on it would be to analyze the search terms that your unsophisticated users actually try to use.
Harvey Frey
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