European law databases: an experiment in retrieval

The project presented has looked at novel retrieval methods for a variety of legal documents using the DAP parallel processor. The system has three main components: the document selector-this may be either the DAPText index server or any other suitable retrieval engine (DAPText is a database indexing engine from Cambridge Parallel Processing which runs on the DAP 610C, a massively parallel Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) processor; the object server or document retriever that returns the full text of selected documents; and the graphical user interface (GUI) that manages the interactions-for example, it translates the user queries into a form appropriate for the retrieval engine being used and converts the retrieved documents from the database storage format into Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) for the Web