Integrated access to legal literature through automated semantic classification

  • Authors:
  • E. Francesconi;G. Peruginelli

  • Affiliations:
  • Institute of Legal Theory and Techniques, Italian National Research Council, Florence, Italy;Institute of Legal Theory and Techniques, Italian National Research Council, Florence, Italy

  • Venue:
  • Artificial Intelligence and Law
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Access to legal information and, in particular, to legal literature is examined for the creation of a search and retrieval system for Italian legal literature. The design and implementation of services such as integrated access to a wide range of resources are described, with a particular focus on the importance of exploiting metadata assigned to disparate legal material. The integration of structured repositories and Web documents is the main purpose of the system: it is constructed on the basis of a federation system with service provider functions, aiming at creating a centralized index of legal resources. The index is based on a uniform metadata view created for structured data by means of the OAI approach and for Web documents by a machine learning approach, which, in this paper, has been assessed as regards document classification. Semantic searching is a major requirement for legal literature users and a solution based on the exploitation of Dublin Core metadata, as well as the use of legal ontologies and related terms prepared for accessing indexed articles have been implemented.