EUCases end-user applications: EuroCases, ConsumerCases and EULinksChecker

Sofia, 24 June 2015

FP7-ICT-2013-SME-DCA

EUCases end-user applications overview

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One application –> two services

ConsumerCases • Online legal information service providing access to national legislation and

case law of 6 EU member states (Austria, Bulgaria, France, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom) in the area of consumer law related to the application of EU law

EuroCases • Online legal information service providing access to national case law of the EU

member states related to the application of EU law

Two applications –> one service

EULinksChecker • Installable add-in applications integrated in MS Word and Internet Explorer

which interactively assist legal professionals in their research by identifying links and establishing connections to EU legislation and case law

Presentation of the web services ConsumerCases and EuroCases

FP7-ICT-2013-SME-DCA

Services profile

• Multilingual web based legal information services

• Building on the foundation of the EUCases Linking Platform which transforms legal open data into linked open data after semantic and structural analysis

• Ensuring access to national case law of six / all EU Member states linked to EU law / EU consumer law

• Offering cross-border information about cases in which EU provisions or EU case law should apply

• Both are niche services oriented to the needs of legal professionals across Europe who:

o Have good command of at least one foreign language of another EU Member state, and

o Apply EU law in their everyday professional activities

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EUCases Linking

Platform

RDF converters

Case summaris. & classific.

tools

NLP tools Linking tools

Akoma Ntoso XML Converters

Crawler tools

EUCases linked open data life cycle

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National sources Country Legislation Case Law

Austria RIS - Rechtsinformationssystem RIS - Rechtsinformationssystem

France Legifrance Legifrance

Germany Gesetze im Internet Verwaltungsvorschriften im Internet

Bundesverfassungsgericht Bundesgerichtshof Bundesverwaltungsgericht Bundespatentgericht Bundesfinanzhof Bundesarbeitsgericht Bundessozialgericht

United Kingdom

legislation.gov.uk The Supreme Court House of Lords judiciary.gov.uk

Bulgaria State Gazette (dv.parliament.bg) Supreme Court of Cassation Supreme Administrative Court Supreme Judicial Council

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EU and international sources

Jurisdiction Legislation Case Law

European Union EUR-Lex portal

EUR-Lex portal • EU case law • National case law • JURE database

Portal of the Court of Justice of the EU • Info Lugano database • Press releases Association of the Councils of State and Supreme Administrative Jurisdictions of the EU • Dec.Nat database • JuriFast database

European Court of Human Rights

HUDOC database

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Jurisdiction/Source Legislation Case law Other

Austria 20,768 691,778 –

Bulgaria 12,295 31,956

(from 1,5 M) –

France 94,180 864,347 –

Germany 7,286 140,699 –

United Kingdom 98,989 1,9085 –

European Court of Human Rights – 97,891 –

Directory of Open Access Journals – – 1,121

European Union – EUR-Lex 340,978 125,099 –

Total 574,496 1,953,678 1,121

Downloaded and converted documents

Documents with links to EU law

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Jurisdiction Number of

documents with

links to EU law

Number of

links to EU

legislation

Number of

links to EU

case law

Total number

of links to EU

law

Austria 23,346 335,020 97,364 432,384

Bulgaria 31,406 417,752 114,176 531,928

Germany 14,576 267,088 102,804 369,892

France 27,421 342,964 31,552 374,516

United Kingdom 1,859 31,584 9,676 41,260

European Union 365,313 6,344,172 1,710,504 8,054,676

Total 463,921 7,738,580 2,066,076 9,804,656

ConsumerCases: content scope • National case law

– More than 10,000 judgments in the area of consumer law

• National legislation

– Laws and regulations of the 6 EU member states covered by the EUCases project: Austria, Bulgaria, France, Germany, Italy and the UK

– National implementing measures

• EU case law

– More than 450 “consumer cases”, mainly of the Court of Justice

• EU legislation

– Including legislative instruments regulating health protection and safety rules & standards for products and services

• Articles from open access journals

– More than 100 articles referring to EU consumer law instruments

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ConsumerCases Home page

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ConsumerCases: National Implementing Measures for Directive 2001/95/EC

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Decree of the President of France for transposition

of Directive 2001/95/EC

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ConsumerCases: Multilingual search

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EuroCases: content scope

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• National case law with EU relevance

– Case law of the supreme and some of the lower instance courts of all EU Member States

– More than 100,000 judgments are available in full text in the language of the case

– Most important judgments are supplied with keywords and summaries in English, French and/or German as well as bibliographic metadata

• International case law (to be incorporated into the service soon)

– Case law of the European Court of Human Rights – in English and French

– Case law of the EFTA Court – in English

• EU case law

– Case law of the Court of Justice of the EU in English, French, German and Bulgarian

• EU legislation

– Treaties (EU primary law)

– Legislation (EU secondary law) – regulations, directives, decisions, etc.

– International agreements with third countries and between the member states

– Documents are available in English, French, German and Bulgarian

EuroCases Home page

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Jurisdiction Number of documents (*)

Austria 23,363

Bulgaria 31,955

France 27,762

Germany 13,403

United Kingdom 1,882

Italy 3,561

Other EU Member States 13,326

Court of Justice of the EU 36,191

European Court of Human Rights 17,019 (**)

Total 168,462

Case law documents in EuroCases

(*) In June 2015 (**) Will be incorporated in the final version of the service

EuroCases vs ConsumerCases

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Content EuroCases ConsumerCases

National legislation –

National case law

EU legislation

EU case law

Case law of the ECtHR –

Areas of EU law covered ALL 1 only

EU member states covered ALL 6 out of 28

Open access articles –

Automated case classification summarisation –

Editorial annotation of cases –

Searching

• Quick search – Google like search in all documents in the database by entering a query in the search bar

• Advanced search – in a drop-down panel by choosing search area and defining search criteria in combination with search text:

o Search in Case law – by names of the parties, by case number, act number or ECLI-number, by jurisdiction, by document date or date range, by terms from different thematic classifiers (Directory of EU case law, EuroVoc Thesaurus, Subject Matter and EuroCases classifier) and others

o Search in EU legislation – by publication reference (OJ date, number, page), by Celex or ELI number, by terms from different thematic classifiers (Directory of EU legislation, EuroVoc Thesaurus and Subject Matte) and others

• Search within document’s text – when opening a document in the results list, all matches of the searched text are highlighted and can be walked trough by the user

• My searches – a list with the search queries performed by the user providing options for editing and/or repeated execution of each search query

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Advanced search in case law

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Advanced search in EU legislation

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Working with lists of documents

• Viewing important data about documents:

o Title – in the language of the document

o Document / Case number – most commonly used identifier of the document

o Country / Jurisdiction – from which the document originates

o Type of document – icon indicating whether the document is legislative or judicial act

o Keywords – for case law documents in one or more languages from one or more sources

o Summary – for case law documents in one or more languages from one or more sources

• Filtering – reduction of the documents in the list to those that correspond to the selected filter

• Exporting documents – in PDF or RTF formats

• Adding to My documents – by checking the asterisk in the title bar above the document

• Recent documents – a list with the last 100 documents opened by the user

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List of judgments of the German Federal Court of Justice

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Working with documents • Document structure – metadata, text, contents and consolidated versions

• Document annotation and metadata

o Keywords – the important national cases and the majority of the judgments of the EU Court of Justice are supplied with keywords selected manually by legal editors. Available in one or more languages from one or more sources

o Summary – only the most important national cases and the majority of the judgments of the EU Court of Justice have editorial summaries in one or more languages from one or more sources

o Press-releases – national and EU cases of special importance for the society, the legal doctrine and/or the legal community

o Publication reference – in all EU legislative instruments

o Languages, formats and link to OJ – links to the available language versions in EUR-Lex of EU legislative and judicial acts as well as to the OJ publication

o Bibliographic notice – for documents with source EUR-Lex it is identical with the notice in this portal. For national judgments it contains:

• Metadata about the document

• Classifications – by terms in the 4 classifications schemes

• Publications and legal doctrine – information about publications of the text of the judgment and about comments in the doctrine

• References – Treaty, Core EU provisions, Other referred EU provisions, EU case law and links to other judgments belonging to the case history

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National case: keywords and summary

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National case: bibliographic notice (1)

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National case: bibliographic notice (2)

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EU legislative instrument: publication reference

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EU legislative instrument: bibliographic notice (1)

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EU legislative instrument: bibliographic notice (2)

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Working with documents (cont.)

• Links to EU law:

o Outbound links – inline links with hint preview of the cited EU legislative instruments and case law of the Court of Justice

o Inbound links – references from other documents to a specific provision

• Search within document’s text – by using the small search bar above the document title and the buttons for first, next, previous and last matches

• Comparison of consolidated versions – from the navigation panel

• Print – by using the standard print function of the browser

• Export – into file in RTF- or PDF-format

• Language versions:

o Document text – from the command bar above the document title. Generally, this is possible for EU documents only. It changes the language of the document text and the values in the metadata section (without the metadata rubrics)

o Document metadata – switching the interface language changes the rubrics (headings) in the metadata section

o Language preferences – can be set from the Settings

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EU legislative instrument: inbound and outbound links

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Outbound links

Inbound links

Presentation of EULinksChecker add-in tools for MS Word and Internet Explorer

FP7-ICT-2013-SME-DCA

EULinksChecker profile

• Installable add-in applications in the most popular browsers, text editors and PDF-viewers

o Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome

o MS Word and OpenOffice Writer

o Adobe Acrobat Reader

• Assisting legal professionals while editing, browsing or viewing documents by identifying and establishing links to EU law and EuroVoc thesaurus, and

• Offering them access to EU and national legislation and case law based on the identified legal citations and recognised ontology terms

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Search with MS Word add-in for national case law referring to a provision of an EU legal instrument

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List of national cases referring to the required provision

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Links to judgment’s texts in EuroCases service

Links to the judgment’s texts at the source web pages

Judgment of the Austrian Supreme Court of Justice in RIS legal portal

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Search with Internet Explorer add-in for documents indexed with EuroVoc concept “Dienstleistung” (service)

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List of documents indexed with the EuroVoc concept “service”

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Thank you for you attention!

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