Research topic / Quality of the research
There is already a considerable amount of research on the issues described in the Mission section, but the many results which have been achieved by research in legal informatics (particularly, in the domain of legal ontologies and on computable legal logics) and by experiences in standardisation (in particular, with regard to the structure of law texts and the tagging of data) need to be integrated and assessed taking also into account legal theory.

The aim of the ONE-LEX project is indeed to provide principled support to the informational-unification of the laws of Europe, that is to facilitate access, integration and reuse of legal information pertaining to the member States and to the European Union. In particular, the project focuses on shared or interoperable standards for legal information, in order to enable its access, communication, processing, and integration through Internet-based technologies.

Standards need to address different aspects of legal information:
  • ways of structuring legal documents and data, so that they can be made available over the Internet, their elements can be automatically identified and processed, legal information pertaining to different sources and States can be queried from single access-points;
  • ways of dealing with changes in the law, so that textual modifications can be clearly identified, the current content of legal texts can be automatically constructed, the applicable law can be more easily determined;
  • ways of defining and applying conceptual classifications to law texts so that, possibly according to appropriate mappings and translations, legal conceptualizations can be applied in understanding and retrieving laws of different countries;
  • ways of building rich executable representations of legal knowledge, which can capture the essential components of legal knowledge, can be transferred from one computer platform to the other, can provide the basis of knowledge-based systems supporting the application of laws of different countries.
The research will be developed at two levels: a theoretical-technological level and a doctrinal- organisational level.
At the theoretical-technological level, the research will aim at studying, analysing, comparing, and proposing standards for the representation of legal information in computable formats, and for its access over the Internet. This will require the integration of all of the following:
  • the analysis of the different aspects of legal information to be represented in computable formalism, taking into account results obtained in legal theory and legal logic;
  • the consideration of the reasoning forms (and the algorithms) according to which such information can be processed in legally correct ways;
  • the precise characterisation of the functions of the different standards for the representation of legal knowledge (whether they should enable structuring texts, identifying the law in force, conceptual retrieval, computer-supported application of the law, and so on);
  • the identification of all standards being currently used, discussed or proposed, and the determination of their comparative merit;
  • the formulation of new proposals concerning standards for legal information, with special regard to the objective of unification or interoperability.
At the doctrinal- organisational level the research aims at analysing the legal issues which are involved in providing legal information over the Internet, and at identifying best practices for ensuring that European citizens and institutions have access to legal contents, through the combined effort of public institutions and private organizations. Thus will include in particular the following aspects:
  • analysing of the legal issues involved in distributing legal information, with particular regard to data protection (for data concerning individual persons), accessibility, and intellectual property;
  • studying the ways in which legal information is currently provided in Europe, focusing on the interaction between the authoritative creation of the law, and the public or private providers of legal information.
In particular, the project will determine how public authorities are due to provide electronic legal information to citizens, to no-profit organisation and professional publishers, with regard to the aims of ensuring knowledge of the law, facilitating European integration, promoting the competitive provision of legal-information services. The issues to be examined include in particular the following: (a) what cost should be charged by public authorities for downloading what kinds of legal documents (or whether no cost or marginal cost should be the rule), (b) to what extent public institutions must address directly the needs of the citizen or rather provide the material for further processing by private organisations, (c) whether there should be no distinction with regard to all (legal) uses and users (public and private, commercial and non-commercial) of such information; (d) to what extent the duty to make knowledge of the law possible includes the requirement that publicly provided legal information implements standards which enable its further processing and circulation; (e) to what extent the duty to contribute to European integration includes the requirement that legal information respects shared standards.
In developing the project, it will be necessary to access the relevant literature on law, computing and legal informatics, to have access to all available materials on experiences in standards for legal information, but it would also be necessarily to establish direct contacts with the diverse, public and private, actors that are involved in setting or adopting standards for legal information.

The output of the project will consist in the following:
- Various scientific contributions concerning the different aspects of the project:
- A book on the formal representation of legal knowledge and its standardisation;
- Guidelines for the provision of legal information over the Internet, concerning both technical and legal requirements.