Pan-European Navigation of Legal Content

Previous year's Nominees

Wolters Kluwer recognizes the changing needs of its evolving markets to supply customers, especially corporate counsel and corporate advisors with content services covering multiple countries and languages. Consolidation and globalization in the legal markets has created new needs to cover many regions and languages in one solution. For years, Wolters Kluwer has been curating its knowledge organization systems (KOS) in the tax, legal, and regulatory domains, optimized to local markets, and needed to create visualizations on how to exploit these in a broader, European-wide context. To investigate this, Wolters Kluwer collaborated with EPAM Systems to build a user experience that demonstrates navigation from Wolters Kluwer’s KOS to related content and repositories in a language independent manner. The project team selected European Union Directives as the content focal point and linked data techniques, particularly SPARQL . The KOS have already been implemented using the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)’s standards of Resource Description Framework (RDF) , RDF Schema (RDFS) , Web Ontology Language (OWL) , and Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) . Combined with help from Wolters Kluwer Netherlands and Germany units, application construction by EPAM was fast and inexpensive. In addition, the project now includes content from DBpedia , EuroVoc , LOD2 , and EUR-Lex initiatives. Given the application’s ability to navigate pan-European legal KOS in a language independent manner, this solution is presented as a candidate for the European Linked Open Data Contest.

Wolters Kluwer and EPAM Systems

Wolters Kluwer
Zuidpoolsingel 2
2408 ZE Alphen aan den Rijn
Netherlands