Abstract

Legal information in Europe is scattered in numerous heterogeneous databases. The data in the databases is structured, organized and classified in various ways, the contents are written in different languages, and the retrieval techniques vary. Providing integrated access to the databases would serve both legal experts and laymen. Issues related to the Web access of European legal databases were studied in the EULEGIS project. Requirements for the integrated service were investigated and a prototype system was implemented. The implementation was based on the idea of rich metadata. An XML-based model for the metadata was developed and implemented. The model included data about legal processes, organizational actors in the processes, types of documents created in the processes, and databases providing access to the documents of the types. An important subset of the metadata was visualized in the user interface graphically. The paper describes the metadata model and how the metadata is used in the user interface.

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