The Finnish Law as a Linked Data Service

Abstract

Abstract. Juridical information is important to organizations and individuals alike and is linked to from all walks of life. The Finnish government has published the Finlex Data Bank 1 for searching and browsing legislation documents. However, the data there is not yet open, is based on a traditional XML schema, and does not conform to new semantic metadata standards. There are many difficulties in maintaining and using the site in, e.g., data harvesting, interoperability, querying, and linking that could be mitigated by the Semantic Web technologies. This paper presents an approach and a project-including first results-for publishing and using the Finnish legislation as a 5-star Linked Open Data service.Publishing and using juridical information is challenging in many ways. It is produced by different parties, such as governmental bureaus, ministries, different levels of courts, research organizations, and media. The content is heterogeneous and produced using differing tools, data formats, and practices. The links between documents are often informal and/or not made explicit. The law in general is a dynamic, changing entity: for example, it is important to be able to refer to different versions of a law at different points of time. These challenges can be addressed through the use of linked data techniques [1]. Further consideration should be paid to offering the linked juridical data in the form of ready-to-use services and end-user applications.Our goal 2 is to create a 5-star linked open data service of the Finnish legislation, a semantic version of Finlex. Based on the service, a next generation of public and commercial legal systems can be built. The work involves 1) juridical ontology development, 2) metadata modeling of legislative documents, 3) the publication of the content as linked data, and 4) the evaluation of the system via application demonstrators.Ontologies We have begun the work by harmonizing different in-use thesauri and building an ontology of legal concepts. A project by the Finnish Ministry of Justice combined ca. 30 vocabularies and thesauri used by different courts in Finland, and we further added two vocabularies used by commercial legal information services. The collected ca. 9,000 different terms were then mapped with the larger KOKO ontology cloud (ca. 45,000 concepts) that is used in Finland. In addition, the anticipated ontology infrastructure includes two classification schemes of law.

Modeling and Querying Greek Legislation Using Semantic Web Technologies

“…To name a few examples, the MetaLex document server [11] (http://doc.metalex.eu/) offers Dutch national regulations published by the official portal of the Dutch government, while the United Kingdom publishes legislation on its official portal (http://www.legislation.gov.uk/). In the same spirit, [9] presents a service that offers Finnish legislation as linked data. Last, the Publications Office of the EU has developed a central content and metadata repository, called CELLAR, for storing official publications and bibliographic resources produced by the institutions of the EU [8].…”