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Concepts Mapping in the Legal Domain: Some Reflections

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 December 2011

Ginevra Peruginelli
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Abstract

This paper, by Ginevra Peruginelli, examines the general issue of mapping concepts of different legal orders, with a focus on legal terminology and semantics of the law. Interoperability between legal thesauri is a possible operative solution in so far as it meets two important functions: cross-collection retrieval and cross-language retrieval. At a practical level a feasibility study, carried out by the Institute of Legal Information Theory and Techniques of the National Research Council of Italy is described. The study aims at aligning a number of thesauri used in e-government services within the EU, while testing new methods of automatic mapping.

Keywords

information retrievalthesaurilegal language
Type
Current Topics
Information
Legal Information Management , Volume 11 , Issue 4 , December 2011 , pp. 268 - 271
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2011. Published by British and Irish Association of Law Librarians

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References

Footnotes

1 ISO 2788–1986: Guidelines for the establishment and development of monolingual thesauri; ISO 5964–1985: Guidelines for the establishment and development of multilingual thesauri; ANSI/NISO Z.39.19-1993 (R2003): Guidelines for the construction, format and management of monolingual thesauri; BS 8723: Structured Vocabularies for Information Retrieval. London, British Standard Institution, 2007

2 Some examples of projects are: CARMEN, RENARDUS, MACS, HILT projects. For CARMEN: Schröder, Albert (2008) Cross concordances of classifications and thesauri, WP12 of the CARMEN Project, http://www.bibliothek.uni-regensburg.de/projects/carmen12/index.html.en; for RENARDUS: Renardus: Academic Subject Gateway Service Europe (2000) http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/renardus/; for MACS: Landry Patrice Providing multilingual subject access through linking of subject heading languages: the MACS approach, http://www.cacaoproject.eu/fileadmin/media/AT4DL/paper-09.pdf; for HILT: Wake, Susannah and Nicholson, Dennis (2001) HILT – High Level Thesaurus Project: building consensus for interoperable subject access across communities. D-Lib Magazine, 7(9), http://www.dlib.org/dlib/september01/wake/09wake.html

3 An example is the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS). Unified Medical Language System – UMLS. http://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/umls/knowledge_sources/metathesaurus/

4 Martin, Weston (1990) “Theoretical and practical approaches to translation: the linguistic issues”, Part I, in An English Reader's Guide to the French Legal System, New York, Berg, 1990, 9–42Google Scholar

5 Rodolfo, Sacco (1996) Riflessioni di un giurista sulla lingua uniforme (lingua del diritto uniforme e il diritto al servizio di una lingua uniforme), Rivista di diritto civile 1, 57–65Google Scholar

6 Fatiha, Sadat; Masatoshi, Yoshikawa and Shunsuke, Uemura, (2006) Exploiting thesauri and hierarchical categories in cross-language information retrieval, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 2448, 139–146Google Scholar

7 Hajdu Barát, Ágnes (2008) “Knowledge organization in the cross-cultural and multicultural society”, in Arsenault, Clément and Tennis, Joseph T. (edited by), Culture and identity in knowledge organization proceedings of the tenth International ISKO Conference, 5–8 August 2008, Montréal, Canada, Würzburg, Ergon Verlag, 91–97Google Scholar

8 Eurovoc is the multilingual, multidisciplinary thesaurus covering the activities of the EU, the European Parliament in particular. It contains terms in 22 EU languages. http://eurovoc.europa.eu/

9 ECLAS. http://ec.europa.eu/eclas

10 UNESCO. http://databases.unesco.org/thesaurus

11 ETT. http://libserver.cedefop.europa.eu/ett/en/

12 GEMET. http://www.eionet.europa.eu/gemet

13 The ITTIG researches into and applies information and communication technology to the areas of law and legal language, legislative technique, legal decision-making, and the training of lawyers. It also researches into themes related to law and public information and computing policy. For further information: http://www.ittig.cnr.it/IndexEng.htm

14 Francesconi, Enrico, Faro, Sebastiano and Marinai, Elisabetta (2008) “A framework for semantic mapping between thesauri”, in Janowski, T., Pardo, T.A. (edited by) Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on theory and practice of electronic governance (ICEGOV), Cairo, 1–4 December 2008, 251–257Google Scholar