Legal Information Management

Table of Contents - December 2011 - Volume 11, Issue 04  

Current Topics

Concepts Mapping in the Legal Domain: Some Reflections

Ginevra Peruginelli

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 retrieval;
  • thesauri;
  • legal language

Ginevra Peruginelli, graduated in law, obtained a Ph.D. in Telematics and Information Society at the University of Florence and received her Master's degree in Computer Science at the University of Northumbria, Newcastle. Since 2003 she has been entitled to practice as a lawyer. She has been working at the Institute of Theory and Techniques of Legal Information of CNR (ITTIG) first as a fellow and from 2007 as legal researcher. Since 2005 she has been a professor under contract on legal informatics at the Law Faculty of University of Perugia. Her current research interests include user legal information requirements, strategies for online legal information retrieval, analysis of legal language in a multilingual environment and evaluation criteria for legal web sites.