Netzwerke / Networks – digitale Ausgabe zum Tagungsband des 19. Internationalen Rechtsinformatik Symposions IRIS 2016.
Dear Reader,
Also this year, the proceedings of the International Legal Informatics Symposium IRIS are not only published as a book, but also digitally, in form of this special edition of Jusletter IT. The general topic of this year’s symposium, is «Networks». This puts the henceforth dominating role of the networked IT as well as the relations between humans, machines and documents into focus. Ahti Saarepää no longer speaks of the knowledge society, but of the network society.
«Networks» are systems, whose structure can be described as a graph; as a set of elements (knots) connected by liaisons (edges). In law, the cooperation structure purports the network structure. The role in the network reflects the significance as stakeholder of the system (or, as per Fritjof Haft, as authority of the law). Currently, it is a system with humans; machines, too, are of increasing importance. It is also typical for the law, that documents likewise play a major role – pioneering laws, key decisions, but also flagship comments. It speaks for itself, therefor, that the legal system is to be understood and analysed as a batch of networks.
Knowledge and Network society, with aspiring digital fundamental rights, demand a fundamental rethinking of legal practitioners. The internet has revolutionized communication. Turning this to account, legal informatics secure the general legal information supply with text corpora in legal informatics systems. By providing an increasing amount of semantic documents, the way to machine-human- or machine-machine-communication is opened. With this, the path is cleared for more efficiency at lower cost – an essential goal in the jurisprudence of the 21st century. The development is stealthy but sustainable and legal informatics are in its heart due to the fact that the knowledge network is changing significantly.
As usual, the IRIS special edition comrpises, alongside with new scientific evidences, articles regarding practical problems and applications of legal informatics. Carrying forward the multimedia publication in cooperation with Editions Weblaw, some of the speeches hold at IRIS will later be available as podcasts, too.
The special edition is composed of following thematic groups:
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Four articles, that could not have been integrated in the proceedings, complement this electronic issue:
- Michael Tonndorf, eCohesion: Die Anforderungen der EU als eine Voraussetzung zur internen und externen Vernetzung von Verwaltungen
- Kolawole John Adebayo, Luigi Di Caro, Guido Boella, Annotating Legal Documents with Ontology Concepts
- Günther Schefbeck, Schwerpunkt «Elektronische Rechtsetzung»
- Christian Dirschl, Thesaurus Generation and Usage at Wolters Kluwer Deutschland GmbH
As adopted last year, the papers peer reviewed by the jury of the LexisNexis Best Paper Award and the top-10 papers are indicated. We would like to thank the members of the jury, Assoc.-Prof. Dr. Christian Bergauer, ao. Univ.-Prof. Dr. Dietmar Jahnel, Univ.-Prof. Dr. Peter Mader, Assoc.-Prof. DI Mag. Dr. Michael Sonntag, ao. Univ.-Prof. Mag. DDr. Erich Schweighofer as well as Univ.-Prof. Dr. Elisabeth Staudegger.
Subscribers can find all the articles of Jusletter IT – the magazine for IT and Law – also in the Weblaw AP. The App can be downloaded for Android (via Google play) and Apple (via App Store).
We hope that the proceedings of the 19th International Legal Informatics Symposium IRIS, in printed and electronic form, will find as much interest as the IRIS publications of previous years!
Vienna and Bern, February 2016
Erich Schweighofer, Franz Kummer, Walter Hötzendorfer and Georg Borges
