www.ilaw.cas.cz

LOIS is one of the projects supported by European Commission in the framework of wider programme aiming to support using of the information ways, means and instruments in the integrating and more and more developing Europe with the name Lexical Ontologies for Legal Information Sharing (LOIS). In the project and its particular parts are involved institutions, scientific institutes and commercial organizations from Italy, Great Britain, Portugal, Netherlands, Austria and Czech Republic that is represented by research team from the Institute of State and Law Academy of Science of the Czech Republic (ISL AS CR). 

The main goal of the project is creation of specific information tool enabling multilingual communication in the field of law and legislation and simultaneously enabling information retrieval in this multilingual legal context on the basis of the own mother language. This information and communication instrument is planned as widely open and accessible for public and private sector of economy as well.

 The scientific ambitions of the project aim primary to the to linguistics and multilingual communication and of course legal informatics and legal linguistics firs of all to the research of legal terminology and the theory of legislation, everything on the basis of electronic information technology in the world of Internet. The domain of law seems to be attractive for the project creators first of all for the reason that by using of the relations and connections among words on the level of synonymy, hyponymy and hyperonymy (various levels of generality of meanings) it could be possible to enable especially to citizens the use of such kind of information and information resources that are otherwise very hardly accessible thanks to using highly professional legal language and terminology. Through interconnection of several Wordnet structures of the legal language it would be possible to enter different European legal resources especially legal databases existing in national languages.

The methodology and technology of the project is based on the special database tool Wordnet oriented to specialized legal terminology produced in the Institute of the Theory and Technology of Legal Information (ITTIG) in Florence on the basis of the Wordnet application for common Italian language. In the Czech language similar applications are also present and are used in the realization of the project. This part of the Czech participation is realized by the team from the Faculty of Informatics of the Masaryk University in Brno where the longitudinal research of applications of the Czech branch of Wordnet is developed.

Researchers:
JUDr. František Novák, CSc., JUDr. František Cvrček, CSc.