Searching and retrieving legal literature through automated semantic indexing

ABSTRACT

Access to legal information and, in particular, to legal literature is examined in conjunction with the creation of a Portal to Italian legal doctrine. 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 Portal: 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. Subject 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.

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INDEX TERMS

Keywords:
document classification, legal ontologies, machine learning, semantic web