Legal knowledge representation using the resource description framework (RDF)

The overwhelming amount of information available on the Internet created a need for electronic methods to sort and classify legal information. Many standards and features based on XML have emerged which make it possible to reuse former categorisation methods common in library science. One of them is RDF. As there has always been an interaction between legal documentation and the technical means available for this task, the paper examines the possibility of using RDF for representing legal knowledge. It is derived from the commercial publishing project Legalo, initiated by epico Informationssysteme GmbH. This was set up as a legal information site on the Internet. It incorporates huge amounts of heterogenous legal data, including bills, decisions, Internet-links, contributions of authors etc. The article explores the advantage of this approach and some further steps towards the automated assembling of legal topics into "legal information packages" in relation to the user needs and inputs