Jusletter IT

Designing a database to assist legal thinking: a new approach to indexing using facets

  • Autoren/Autorinnen: Günter Reiner / Michelle Cumyn / Hudon Michèle / Sabine Mas
  • Kategorie: Beiträge
  • Region: Deutschland, Kanada
  • Rechtsgebiete: Juristische Informatik-Systeme und Anwendungen, LegalTech, Rechtsinformation & Juristische Suchtechnologien, Innovationen in der Rechtsinformatik
  • Sammlung: Tagungsband IRIS 2019
  • Zitiervorschlag: Günter Reiner / Michelle Cumyn / Michèle Hudon / Sabine Mas, Designing a database to assist legal thinking: a new approach to indexing using facets, in: Jusletter IT 21. Februar 2019
A well-designed database supports legal thinking by bringing together the request for information and the information contained within the documents of the database. Indexing is one of the oldest means to achieve this goal, and yet there is still a lot of potential for improvement. What is missing is a syntactic structuring of semantic indexing. This is the subject of the interdisciplinary project described below, which is currently entering the testing phase. Inspired by the theory of faceted classification, we have built a prototype database containing 2,500 cases in the areas of administrative law, labour law and the law of obligations. Using a controlled vocabulary, we have (manually) indexed such decisions with keywords, assigning each one to one of six predefined categories or facets (Person, Action, Thing, Context, Legal category and Sanction). In this way, we have formalized the legal essence of the database content in a way that is not unlike an ontology. Our hypothesis is that our model will improve search results, facilitating the search for cases with similar facts and supporting legal thinking by revealing connections between facts and legal consequences that co-occur within decisions of the database. A further step will be to consider whether our scheme may serve as a tool for the automatic indexing of court decisions.

Table of contents

  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Requirements for a database that supports legal thinking
  • 2.1. The task of legal research
  • 2.2. The assistance provided by legal databases
  • 2.3. The need to improve semantic indexing
  • 3. A new approach to indexing using facets
  • 3.1. Presentation of the approach
  • 3.2. The grammar analogy: a syntax of legal information
  • 4. Potential for automatic indexing
  • 5. References

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