La collaboration et le contenu généré par les usagers, aussi appelé « Web 2. 0 », sont des phénomènes nouveaux, qui bâtissent sur l'ouverture et le foisonnement d'Internet. Les environnements numériques qui emploient ces moyens mettent à contribution la communauté qui gravite autour d'une présence virtuelle afin d'en enrichir l’expérience. Suivant une approche constructiviste, nous explorons commnent la collaboration peut servir les usagers d'une banque de donnée de jugements en accès libre...

With the emergence of Internet various institutions started making available important legal materials in centralized online databases. Depending on the previous classification of data, available resources, degree of disclosure, each organization adopts its own way to present materials online. Oftentimes institutions providing similar data organize it in different ways (different titles, categories, search criteria, search engines, websites etc.) Additionally, some may do it differently due...

This article by Rachel Brett of Lovells reports on the results of a survey into classification practice in law libraries carried out through the BIALL and LIS-Law mailing lists in March 2007. Major findings were that only three respondents did not use any form of subject classification. The most frequently used classification scheme was Moys, and the single largest grouping was the 40 respondents (40.8%) who used their own in-house classification schemes.

Information-seeking is important for lawyers, who have access to many dedicated electronic resources. However there is considerable scope for improving the design of these resources to better support information-seeking. One way of informing design is to use information-seeking models as theoretical lenses to analyse users’ behaviour with existing systems. However many models, including those informed by studying lawyers, analyse information-seeking at a high level of abstraction and are...

To help design an environment in which professionals without legal training can make effective use of public sector legal information on planning and the environment - for Add-Wijzer, a European e-government project - we evaluated their perceptions of usefulness and usability. In concurrent think-aloud usability tests, lawyers and non-lawyers carried out information retrieval tasks on a range of online legal databases. We found that non-lawyers reported twice as many difficulties as those...

Users of search engines express their needs as queries, typically consisting of a small number of terms. The resulting search engine query logs are valuable resources that can be used to predict how people interact with the search system. In this paper, we introduce two novel applications of query logs, in the context of distributed information retrieval. First, we use query log terms to guide sampling from uncooperative distributed collections. We show that while our sampling strategy is at...

The renaissance of interest in American legal history has been greatly aided by a variety of developments in the materials and methods of legal research. Legal history has become a new center of attention in American legal education and scholarship and has attracted similarly enhanced interest in university history departments. Fortunately, this comes at a time when increasingly sophisticated research techniques and sources are gaining wide acceptance in both the academic and legal communities. Professor Cohen surveys the effects of these advances on research in American legal history.

"The aim of our research is the improvement of Boolean search with query expansion using lexical ontologies and user feedback. User studies strongly suggest that standard search techniques have to be improved in order to meet legal particularities. Query expansion can exploit the potential of linguistic knowledge and successful user behaviour. First tentative results show the feasibility of our approach. A first search prototype has been built and tested in the area of European state aid law."

Knowledge Discovery from Legal Databases is the first text to describe data mining techniques as they apply to law. Law students, legal academics and applied information technology specialists are guided thorough all phases of the knowledge discovery from databases process with clear explanations of numerous data mining algorithms including rule induction, neural networks and association rules. Throughout the text, assumptions that make data mining in law quite different to mining other data...

Présentation d'un nouvel outil dans Westlaw permettant d'accéder via un lien à des décisions ayant la même classification que celle où se trouve le lien.

Web-search queries are typically short and ambiguous. To classify these queries into certain target categories is a difficult but important problem. In this article, we present a new technique called query enrichment, which takes a short query and maps it to intermediate objects. Based on the collected intermediate objects, the query is then mapped to target categories. To build the necessary mapping functions, we use an ensemble of search engines to produce an enrichment of the queries. Our...

Browsing big legal databases has become a part of daily work activity in an almost every modern law o ce. Legal regulations change more often than it was in the past and to re- main up-to-date, one must use electronic media collections for help. The problem is that most popular databases take queries in formal query languages (e.g. SQL), which can be di cult for the casual database user. This project tries to determine, how the lawyers can be helped by providing natural language interface to...

Legal information is often accessible via portal web sites. Legal documents typically combine structured and unstructured information, the former being tagged with markup languages such as XML (Extensible Markup Language). Current information retrieval research takes into account the structured information content of documents when computing the relevance ranking. Such an approach is very promising for the retrieval of legal documents. This is illustrated with two retrieval models specifically designed for the retrieval of legislation.

Professor Peoples reports the results of a study finding that the opinions and performance of modern legal researchers do not support the traditional notion that print digests are the tool of choice for researching legal rules while electronic databases are best suited for finding cases discussing unique factual situations. Tomorrow's lawyers are unaware of some common shortcomings of electronic research and do not possess the strategies to compensate for them. Law librarians must become...

This note comprises a series of schedules listing databases that are useful for people conducting legal research in New Zealand. The note’s objective is to make it easier for people who know approximately what they are looking for to identify an appropriate database to search.

This note comprises a series of schedules listing databases that are useful for people conducting legal research in New Zealand. The note’s objective is to make it easier for people who know approximately what they are looking for to identify an appropriate database to search.

Cette étude expose à partir de l’exemple de la banque de données Juris-Data la logique qui préside à la conception et à la constitution des fichiers de données juridiques – décisions de tribunaux et données issues de revues spécialisées – et analyse les effets de ce traitement d’information sur la production doctrinale. Elle démontre que, en collectant, sélectionnant et traitant les données essentielles, puis en facilitant leur repérage, l’informatique juridique documentaire participe à...