Spanish researchers participate in the development of an intelligent system for searching information on legislation

The research goal is to develop an intelligent system to search information on legislation concerning intellectual property rights, consumer rights and digital rights. Its aim is to give legal operators and the general public easy access to this information.

Other project team members, apart from VAI, are the University of Chile, the Federal University of Santa Catarina (Brazil) and the Fasta de Mar del Plata School of Engineering (Argentina). The project is coordinated by Brazil’s Institute of Electronic Government, Legal Intelligence and Systems (IJURIS), which is the sponsor of the initiative.

The project will be based on the Internet information analysis system called Ontoweb, which enables contextualized searches.The project is to produce a new generation tool with built-in digital text processing technologies based on contextualized and structured search, dynamically contextualized knowledge representation and ontological engineering. According to VAI’s principal investigator, Jesús Cardeñosa, the tool will put a new slant on information retrieval technologies.

VAI’s input

VAI’s input to this project is underpinned by earlier research into on text-based ontology construction based on intermediate representations of text contents using UNL (Universal Networking Language) technology.

Another VAI input will be its documented experience in advanced information retrieval technologies based on structured networks of terms, like Wordnet, the lexical database developed by linguists at the University of Princeton’s Cognitive Science Laboratory.

Numerous applications

Once concluded, the project will be applied to document search in domains like patents and industrial design office records, technology transfer agreements, trademarks, software and intellectual work. It will also be applicable to electronic fraud, virtual crimes, privacy and new technologies, electronic contracts, and electronic certification and digital signature, as well as software consumer law.

The one-year project was approved last December and will be ready for deployment in 2009.