What are the characteristics of legal online services in Germany in 2010?
First, the fact that Germany is a code-based country makes legal online services in Germany an ideal target for any kind of invention in the area of text retrieval. For example, at the federal level there are more than 5,000 pieces of legislation with more than 100 provisions each. If you think of one specific term in paragraph 4 of § 97 GWB as a very precise reference to a specific legal issue, consider that • § 97 GWB is one out of more than 500,000 provisions, • these provisions follow a semantic structure, and • nearly all existing legal documents refer to specific provisions at the European, federal, state, or municipal level. You thus get a sense of the challenge of legal online services in Germany. But you also get a sense of their potential. One could put it this way: The semantic web of legal content in Germany already exists; we “only” have to apply a common syntactical representation in order to create a very rich business resource by linking millions of individual and heter
