Jusletter IT

This paper concerns the legal system and legal documentation, as well as their interconnectedness. In the term metalevel, we use the prefix meta with the meaning of with and across and not beyond. The granularity problem is in our view. Legal documentation does not reproduce a legal source one-to-one. Examples of legal metalevels are legal terms, ontologies, annotations, commentaries, etc. We see a challenge for legal informatics to represent legal networks explicitly. We find the idea of a network in the interdisciplinary approach that was proposed by Van Hoecke and Ost in 1993. We project the core and peripheral areas around the legal system onto Schweighofer’s 8 views/4 methods approach. Making the core-periphery networks more explicit would also contribute to the evaluative synthesis of legal decisions. Thus, explicit visual navigation through a legal information system would support the wandering back and forth of the glance between the normative and the factual.