Legal Software: Launch of OpenLaws.eu: Project to improve access to law in Europe

miercuri, 2 aprilie 2014

Launch of OpenLaws.eu: Project to improve access to law in Europe

OpenLaws.eu — a new project aimed at improving access to legal information in the European Union — has launched.

In 2013 the project received funding from European Commission (DG Justice).

Here is a description from the project’s Website:

openlaws will make legislation, case law and legal literature more accessible. Together with YOU we will add a social layer on top of existing legal information systems. With openlaws it will be easier to work with others and to organize legal information.

openlaws is currently in a STARTING PHASE and will provide various selected tools throughout the next years. Right now we can already offer a meta-search engine for legal content in Europe (based on N-Lex databases) and a legal App environment. [...]

According to the project’s Website, the project lasts for two years.

The project has a Twitter account — @OpenLaws — and a Facebook page.

Here is a description of the project, from the grant announcement:

Our vision is to provide open and easy access to legal information for everybody: Legal professionals, citizens and businesses.

For this purpose we will link legal content (legislation and case law based on open data), provide meta search functionalities, offer productivity tools (setting favorites, highlighting, tagging, etc), and run an open access journal. We are following an open innovation strategy, so everybody will be invited to contribute.

The project has already made available legal meta-search tools for the European Union and Austria.

The meta-search tools use Fabian Vogler’s Open Law Search technology (see source code on GitHub), developed at the Law Mining Hackathon at OKCon 2013.

Here are the project’s vision and objectives, from the project’s About page:

Vision

openlaws.eu aims at opening access to existing legal information systems and proactively involving and integrating our target groups, i.e. communities of individuals and businesses, legal professionals and public bodies. Open innovation, mass customization, big data analysis, social features and social networks are already highly successful in other markets and we want to introduce them in the legal domain on a European scale. Based on open data, open source software and open innovation principles we are adding a “social layer” to the existing “institutional layer” of legal information systems.

Objectives

The main objectives are:

To create a clear BOLD Vision 2020 about what Big Open Legal Data (BOLD) could do in the year 2020 and propose a roadmap to implement it.

To build a BOLD ICT Platform, based on open source software, which will be the first step to combine legal content and the knowledge and feedback of the community.

[...]

The consortium carrying out the project includes:

University of Amsterdam, Leibnitz Center for Law

Salzburg University of Applied Sciences

London School of Economics and Political Science

University of Sussex

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