Blogging on IRIS 2008
IRIS 2008 - the International Legal Informatics Symposium - has taken place in Slzburg, Austria from february 21st to 23rd 2008. Beside the official website of the conference there is a nice blog of some web enthusiasts on LAWgical. Take o look on it!
Redesign of Austrian legal information system RIS
Here's you might view or download a presentation about the redesign of the austrian legal information system RIS (Rechtsinformationssystem)
=> www.sribd.com
XOPUS - the friendly XML editor
Xopus is a WYSIWYG XML Editor that runs in the browser. Xopus enables end-users to work with structured and complex content without the need for technical knowledge. Xopus presents the user with a friendly interface to XML and enables publishing houses to provide different templates for different purposes to authors. The advantage is to gather structure at the information source. The adittional effort for structuring and markup will be minimalized.
More information on => xopus.com
Dynamic and static references
In austrian legislative guidlines dynamic references from one norm to another are allowed only, when both norms stem from the same body of jurisdiction. Only then the lawmaker has control over the consequences of the norm.
When there is a reference to a norm of another body of legislation, then it is by default a static reference ïn the version of ...".
See also the => Sozdok documentation - section "Verweiserkennung mit Linkparser".
Retroactive Enactment
This often happens in soial security and tax legislation. So you get different versions, when looking onto the norm before or after the retroactive enactment was published.
This was considered in the legal database of austrian social securities http://www.sozdok.at/.
You can find some explanation in the section "Fragen" - look for "Zeitschichtenaufbereitung, Sicht- und Stichtag".
The current programm...
...on ONE-LEX Website =>> more
(I hope there will be an additional coffee break at mondaz morning!)
A hint to the participants staying at Casa Don Secchiaroli or else near Piazza delle Cure: If you°re looking for a nice walk to clear your mind, then just take Via Giovanni Boccaccio 1 km along this little river and then about 2 km in a long "Z" up the hill. You can't miss Villa Schifanoia at No 121.
The forest of law and legal informatic passing by
This posting isn't of vital interest. It just explains, why I choose this blog-title image. You ought to skip it.
Some weeks ago I had a nice weekend at Prague. Riding back to Vienna by train, I had plenty of time and played with my camera taking a picture from the forest passing by outside. Back home I sifted through the pictures and wondered: It was more a reflection of myself in the window, than a picture of the forest outside.
What will I discover, when looking on law and legal informatics? What will I detect on the picture constructed inside my brain? An objective reallity, as it is? I think, my perception will be more a reflection of myself, than an image of the reality. Law, legal informatics, data structures, ontologies: We do construct it by our own needs. (But sometimes we don't keep that in our minds.)
Profile: Christian Wachter
I'm working at the publishing house of the austrian unions federation and that's how I hit across legal informatics. We publis information about labour legislation for employees and their representatives - print and online (klick on "Demozugang" or enter "lexml" / "lexml"). So I got two questions:
- How can we publish efficiently legal information from different sources, which is badly structured and not at all standardized?
- How can we make this information findable and understandable not only for the experts but also for these, who are subjected to the laws?
I hope for some help from information technology and science - not only by applying tools but more by implementing methods and proceedures.I'm not a jurist, but studied economics and worked for some years at a newspaper publishing house, tranfoming the paper archive into an state of the art information research center. Thus I experienced, that there are quite different cultures in the business and the legal information sector. The latter isn't the sector of early adopters. This might give us the chance to learn from the succes and errors of others.
