Towards an Open Platform for Legal Information
This addresses the problem of limited open access and fragmented applications in the legal domain, though it is incremental as it builds on existing technologies.
The authors tackled the lack of open access and extensibility in legal information systems by developing an open-source platform for processing Legal Open Data, resulting in metadata generation for over 250,000 German laws and court decisions.
Recent advances in the area of legal information systems have led to a variety of applications that promise support in processing and accessing legal documents. Unfortunately, these applications have various limitations, e.g., regarding scope or extensibility. Furthermore, we do not observe a trend towards open access in digital libraries in the legal domain as we observe in other domains, e.g., economics of computer science. To improve open access in the legal domain, we present our approach for an open source platform to transparently process and access Legal Open Data. This enables the sustainable development of legal applications by offering a single technology stack. Moreover, the approach facilitates the development and deployment of new technologies. As proof of concept, we implemented six technologies and generated metadata for more than 250,000 German laws and court decisions. Thus, we can provide users of our platform not only access to legal documents, but also the contained information.