EUR Lex Legal Analysis Methodology - Juraj Kuba

In this presentation, Juraj Kuba (Legal Assistant at Publications Office of the European Union) explains the legal analysis methodology used for EUR-Lex.

EUR-Lex Legal analysis methodology (LAM) defines and describes the use of metadata elements that are relevant for the legal and documentary analysis of the legal documents published in the Official Journal of the European Union and on EUR-Lex website.

The attributes used cover the publication and descriptive metadata, both representing the legal data typical for the Legal Domain, but with a particular focus on EU Law and its specificities.
Additionally, LAM also defines classes of EU legal documents according to the hierarchy of norms in EU Law and provides a selection of metadata elements that are determinative or suitable for every class, incl. cardinality and values constrains.

The metadata elements employed by LAM refer to formal properties in the Common Data Model (CDM) of the resources published by the Publications Office. CDM is a FRBR based ontology described by using RDF(S)/OWL technologies.

This presentation informs about the project aiming to transpose LAM from a plain text into a formal LAM ontology (expressed in OWL2 language) and into a set of formal data shapes (expressed in SHACL language).

The goal is to (a) enable an easy access to LAM, quick navigation through its content and interactive maintenance by creating (for example) a standalone LAM web application, (b) checking the consistency of LAM where the model should be able to identify potential internal conflicts, (c) automatic validation of the document descriptions attributed by the legal analysis and (d) potential automation of the legal analysis process.

Concerning the last goal, LAM can substantially contribute to such automation, but only a real interoperability between LAM, CDM and proper markup ontology (AKN4EU), supported by additional involvement of other technologies (for example text mining) can lead to significant results.