Jusletter IT

The Weblaw Search Technology (WST; Weblaw AG) uses several legal thesauri. One is the «Jurivoc thesaurus» of the Swiss Federal Supreme Court. This contains about 9’000 descriptors and about 18’000 non-descriptors and is used mostly for indexing of cases. Other Swiss courts use their own thesauri, if any. Jurivoc is monohierarchical and three-lingual and contains at least partly direct translations of the descriptors. We have also added an English translation within the frame of WST. The best results are achieved with a combination of different types of indexing: legal descriptors from the thesaurus and legislation citations (extended by numerous other legal citations). After the transformation and the preparation of an indexed document, the keywords (descriptors) are applied to it following a complex set of rules depending on the use case and the context. Direct matches, grammatical forms as well as parts of compound words are all taken into account when assigning descriptors (and synonyms) to a document. The integration of further data sources and cross connections is to be seen as a development scenario. (ah)