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Journal of Information, Law and Technology


Solving the Problems of Finding Law on the Web: World Law and DIAL

Graham Greenleaf, Project Leader ([email protected])
Daniel Austin, Philip Chung and Andrew Mowbray,
Software Authors and System Developers
Madeleine Davis, and Jill Matthews,
Legal Indexers
Australasian Legal Information Institute (AustLII)


Part 2


This is a refereed article published on: 29 February 2000


Citation: Greenleaf G et al, 'Solving the Problems of Finding Law on the Web: World Law and DIAL', 2000 (1) The Journal of Information, Law and Technology (JILT). <http://www.law.warwick.ac.uk/jilt/00-1/greenleaf.html>

6. Storing Searches to Create a Self-Maintaining Index
One of our main tactics in creating a sustainable World Law catalog is the use of `stored search links' (or `stored searches') in the catalog.

For example, on the Intellectual Property Subject Index page (below) there are various stored searches for different aspects of intellectual property. The hypertext links that appear on the page are each a search of World Law that a legal indexer has created in order to find a general set of documents which relate to the topics of the searches. For example, the link entitled `World Law search: trade marks and related laws' is in fact a stored Boolean search for `trade mark or trademark or unfair competition or passing off'. These examples are relatively simple searches, but searches of any complexity can be stored.


<http://beta.austlii.edu.au/links/World/Subject_Index/Intellectual_Property/
Stored_Searches/index.html>

The significance of these `stored searches' of DIAL Search in the DIAL Index is twofold:

·         Stored searches are by experts. The legal indexers responsible for developing and maintaining the catalog have expertise in search techniques, and know what types of searches are most effective over World Law. By creating stored searches at sensible locations in the index they make this expertise available to users of the index who are unlikely to have the same level of search expertise. For example, the search for `patent law' above is actually a search for `patent* or brevet* or octrooi*', utilizing both the French and Dutch terms, and truncation, to search effectively for the relevant terms in Spanish Portuguese, German and it.

·         Another example is the above link for `World Law Search: integrated circuits protection (semiconductor chip or circuit layout)', which is in fact the stored search listed below. Most users would not be aware that `integrated circuit', `semiconductor chip' and `circuit layout' are all expressions used in legislation to refer to the same type of legal protection, and yet all three terms are used in the six most relevant documents found. An unassisted user would be unlikely to find the 620 documents relating to this topic. A user who only searches for `integrated circuit' will miss over 200 documents.



·         A stored search rarely needs to be updated. An expert who creates a stored search only has to do so once. When more data is added to the World Law by the Web spider, the expert does not have to change the stored search, because it will now find relevant new legislation and other materials as well as the old materials (assuming the search was well-constructed in the first place). The Intellectual Property page will to some extent update itself without editors adding new links to it. In contrast, sets of ordinary hypertext links to legislation must be updated constantly when legislation changes, or other new material is available. Stored searches can to some extent create a `self-maintaining catalog', partly overcoming the impossibility of detailed subject indexing of world-wide legal information.

·         Users can leverage more precise searches off general stored searches. The results display of a stored search allows the search to be modified by the user. For example, the following search form appears on the search results page for the integrated circuits stored search above. A user who wishes to search for the relationship between copyright law and integrated circuits law need only add `copyright near ...' to the previous (stored) search, and press `Refine Search', to carry out this more precise and expert search. In this way, World Law users can `leverage off' the expertise of the legal indexers.



·         Poor searches can find better searches. Inclusion of stored search links means that, since the catalog is searchable, a search can find other searches. For example, if a user does a World Law Search for `breach of confidence', only one category is found, the Intellectual Property Subject Index page above, which contains the stored search `DIAL Search for trade secrets or confidential information'. However, if that stored search is then selected, over 150 items are found and ranked, because the stored search was for `trade secret or segredo commercial or breach of confidence or confidential information'. The user may not have been aware that in most commercial contexts, `trade secret' is a conceptually the same as `breach of confidence', but the invitation to repeat a search, and the stored search links, will assist the user to `find' this information.

6.1 Finding Law about a Country
One particularly effective use of stored searches in World Law Search is to use them to enable users to find starting points for research concerning the laws of a named country. In the example below, the stored search is for `fiji* or fidji* or fiyi* or fidschi* or figi*' , so as to find entries in most common European languages. The titles of the first few results show the effectiveness of the multi-lingual search. The total of 1366 items show how much is available even for a small country like Fiji.



Because the relevance ranking tends to give short documents and documents that use a search term in a title, many of the internet law indexes that have a separate page for that country will appear near the top of the list, so the user can they quickly review existing intellectual law indexes for that country. Here, the first 15 items found are a mixture of the `Fiji' pages in other internet law indexes (JurWeb, ICL and ILRG), documents about human rights compliance, and Asian Development Bank law and development project notices.

6.2 Future Development of Stored Searches
The Intellectual Property stored searches are an example of how the current `World >> Subject Index' pages will be developed so that each subject category has a basic set of stored searches that will keep that part of the subject index reasonably current. Resources will be available for more intensive intellectual indexing of some subject index pages, but this will not always be possible, so the use of stored searches will allow a moderate cost `across the board' extension of the subject index.

In the longer term work will be done on the use of legal thesauri to create large scale sets of stored searches and their distribution through the catalog. Good thesauri are difficult to find on the web.

7. Multi-Lingual Law Indexing and Searching of the Web
The resources available on the Web for legal research are biased in favour of English, but there is a very large quantity of non-English language materials if only they can be located. Apart from the inherent value, the availability on the Web of the laws of a person's own country is more likely than most other factors to encourage that person to undertake legal research using other countries laws on the Web.

The key to the development of a genuinely world-wide free access catalog and search facility for law is definitely the formation of `indexing partnerships' with legal institutions with expertise in other key languages for materials on the Web (Chinese, French, Spanish, German, Russian). Development of the technical capacity to handle different character sets is also required.

As the range of non-English materials searchable in World Laws increases, it is likely to become valuable to be able to limit searches to materials in a particular language. This will probably be implemented by the indexer indicating the language of non-English materials at the time of adding them to World Law Search, with an option for users to exclude or include materials in particular languages.

7.1 Automated Translation of Pages - Useful but Limited
All pages in World Law have a [Translate] button that takes the user to Alta Vista's automated translation service, provided by Systran translation software and ensures that the Systran page has inserted in it the correct URL for the DIAL page that the user was just viewing (in the example below, the World page). The user then only has to select to which language the DIAL page is to be translated, press the `Translate' button, and then be returned to the DIAL page translated into the language of choice.





The resulting translation seems adequate to convey the meaning of most of the items on the page.


The World page and search options translated automatically to French by Systran

The Alta Vista/Systran translation facility is at present limited to translations from English to French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, or German, and vice-versa. This translation facility is also only a prototype, and sometimes has inadequate processing power to translate very long pages. It is also not recommended to use it to translate documents with complex grammar, or where accuracy is vital (such as legislation). However, for pages such as menus, or lists of search results, it is usually extremely helpful.

The translation facility has uses beyond translations of catalog pages:

·         A World Law user can use the translation facility to translate their proposed search terms into another language before conducting a search, so as to obtain multi-language synonyms.

·         Search results pages may be translated, so that if a search finds documents in another language, their titles can be translated into a language understood by the searcher.

·         By initiating the translation facility before leaving the World Law pages (either on a catalog page or the search results page), and then selecting a remote document in a foreign language to browse, the Alta Vista translation facility will `follow' the user as he or she browses from page to page, asking each time if this page is also to be translated between the two languages.

The combined result of these translation features for a world index is revolutionary: instead of being an `English only' facility, it is now effectively available in six of the most pervasive European languages.

7.2 Embedding Multi-Lingual Searches
Where embedded searches are included on the catalog pages, if it is possible they are being constructed as multi-lingual searches. For example, on the Mozambique page <http://beta.austlii.edu.au/links/World/Countries/Mozambique/index.html>, the embedded search for `Search World Law: Mozambique' is in fact a search for `mozambi* or mocambiq* or mosambi*'. Similar multi-lingual searches by country names have been placed as stored searches on all country pages (more than 200 <http://beta.austlii.edu.au/links/World/Countries/index.html>) in World Law.

At present the languages used cover most common European languages, with translations constructed using the Eurodicautom <http://eurodic.echo.lu/cgi-bin/edicbin/EuroDicWWW.pl> service.



Translations of country names in a number of Asian languages will be added next to the embedded searches. As these searches are permanent, broad searches of all the documents indexed from time to time, an investment of time in the construction of such searches is probably more effective than equivalent time spent indexing sites in detail.

8. Future Directions
8.1 Building a Perverse Portal
Internet `portal sites' have been described as designed to perform two functions (Hinton 1999, Chapter 3): (i) providing users with the range of tools they need to find the content they want; and (ii) obtaining large audiences so as to generate revenue, typically through advertising (and the user surveillance it usually involves). World Law aims to be a portal for legal information, but it is a perverse one, because it is based around the idea of free access to Web resources and does not depend on advertising or individual subscriptions to sustain its development and maintenance.

If World Law succeeds it will be because the technical infrastructure that we are creating, and the collaborative environment within which it is used, is capable of attracting the interest and cooperation of others around the world with a commitment to the provision of free access to legal information via the Internet, and an expertise in some part of the Internet's rapidly expanding legal content.

8.2 Building Internet Legal Research in Asia - DIAL Training
One aim of World Law is to build an audience for legal research resources on the Internet which goes beyond the normal users in law firms and law schools of the developed world, and provides a facility which is also valued and used in the developing counties of the world as an affordable and genuinely international resource for legal development.


First DIAL training session for Mongolian teachers from the Legal Retraining Centre, Ulaan Baatar, held at the University of Melbourne on 9 July 1999.

The Asian Development Bank's funding of the training component of Project DIAL is a significant experiment in achieving this broader goal. DIAL involves in-country training of government lawyers (and others as resources permit) in seven Developing Member Countries (DMCs) of the Bank: Vietnam, Philippines, China, India, Pakistan, Indonesia and Mongolia. The DIAL training team will involve creation of a team from eight countries: local trainers in each of these DMCs, a Regional Training Coordinator from the Philippines Rachel Romana of CD Asia and her colleagues., and the DIAL lead consultants at AustLII. `Train the trainer' courses are planned to begin in Mongolia, the Philippines and Vietnam during 1999, and in the other countries in 2000. In addition there will be on-line training materials that anyone can access, and DIAL-user email list where anyone trained in DIAL use will be able to receive online support from the DIAL training team in any aspect of Internet legal research.

References
Greenleaf G (1998) Developing the Internet for Asian Law - Project DIAL (A feasibility study and prototype (Asian Development Bank, January 1998, 156 pgs) - at <http://www2.austlii.edu.au/~graham/DIAL_Report/>.

Greenleaf G, King G, Mowbray A, Austin D and Matthews J (1997) `Future-proofing a global internet index by a targeted Web spider and embedded searches' Australian Society of Indexers Annual Conference `The Futureproof Indexer' 27-28 September 1997, Katoomba, Australia - at <http://www2.austlii.edu.au/~graham/Futureproof/indexers.html>.

Greenleaf G, Mowbray A and van Dijk P (1995) `Representing and using legal knowledge in integrated decision support systems - DataLex WorkStations' Artificial Intelligence and Law , Kluwer, Vol 3, Nos 1-2, 1995, 97-124.

Hinton S (1999) Portal Sites: Emerging structures for Internet control Research Report No 6 La Trobe University Online Media Program, January 1999.

Lawrence S and Giles C L (1999) `Accessibility of information on the Web' Nature, Vol 400, 8 July 1999, pgs 107-9 (Macmillan, UK).


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