{"id":236,"date":"2010-06-15T12:17:58","date_gmt":"2010-06-15T17:17:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/voxpop\/2010\/06\/15\/the-impact-of-metadata-standards-on-traditional-legal-online-services-in-germany\/"},"modified":"2010-06-29T19:31:40","modified_gmt":"2010-06-30T00:31:40","slug":"the-impact-of-metadata-standards-on-traditional-legal-online-services-in-germany","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/voxpop\/2010\/06\/15\/the-impact-of-metadata-standards-on-traditional-legal-online-services-in-germany\/","title":{"rendered":"The Impact of Metadata Standards on Traditional Legal Online Services in Germany"},"content":{"rendered":"

It is common sense within the information industry that revenue will shift from print to online (see Ulrich Hermann, CEO of Wolters Kluwer Germany, in FAZ<\/i> on April 7th 2010, p. 15<\/a>).\"Law<\/a><\/p>\n

But what is the impact of current technical trends in metadata standards<\/a> on legal online services in Germany? Is there any impact? If you take the real market penetration of metadata standards into account, one could say that the concept of metadata standards has failed. At least, standards such as the \u201cSaarbr\u00fccker Standard\u201d<\/a> (a standard, created in 2000, for court decisions in German jurisdictions) have never been used widely. Nevertheless we kicked off<\/a> jurMeta<\/a> — a proposed new metadata standard for German-language legal resources<\/a> — at the EDV-Gerichtstag 2009<\/a>, a major German conference on judicial information systems.<\/p>\n

Market trends in Germany<\/strong><\/p>\n

In order to understand the impact of metadata standards, we need to consider such standards in the context of legal online services in Germany, and current trends.<\/p>\n

What are the market trends in online services in Germany? The content coverage is rapidly growing, particularly from an end-user’s perspective. State authorities and publishing houses are publishing primary content free of charge<\/a> for various reasons; law firms are running blogs with comments on the latest court cases (JuraBlogs<\/a>); lawyers and clients are using services that publish advice, even when related to concrete disputes (frag-einen-anwalt.de<\/a>). European legislation (in particular the Public Sector Information Directive<\/a>) is encouraging member states and public sector bodies to take proactive measures to promote reuse of public sector information in order to exploit its business potential.<\/p>\n

At the same time the technical infrastructure for sharing information is getting better. Interested persons do not need any technical skills to instantly set up a vertical search engine with Google custom search<\/a>. Open source tools are even covering high end demands of private online publishers.\u00a0 There is an open source tool or project that addresses the private publisher\u2019s needs in any aspect, e.g. performance (CouchDB<\/a>), machine learning (Mahout<\/a>), or relevance ranking (Open Relevance Project<\/a>). And in most cases it is not only a solution but a high end solution that can be adopted free of (licensing) cost.<\/p>\n

Of course social networks<\/a> have to be named as a trend in law online. Services such as Marktplatz-Recht.de<\/a>, JUSMEUM<\/a>, and justanswer<\/a> are creating communities of legal professionals. These services combine the benefits of online communities with expertise in the area of law and thus generate new revenue streams. Social networks organize value-adding-processes efficiently since they allow one to exploit cognition [i.e., the people having the most knowledge] at the source. (I once called this the paradigm of the \u201ccheapest value adder\u201d; see G\u00fctezeichen als Qualit\u00e4tsaussage im digitalen Informationsmarkt: dargestellt am Beispiel elektronischer Rechtsdatenbanken<\/i> (2000)<\/a>, p. 25.) Chances are high that vertical social networks will repeat the success of their generic predecessors, at least at a smaller scale.<\/p>\n

Do legal online services exhibit these features only in Germany? The answer is No. These market trends are most likely valid throughout the world.\u00a0 I will come to the specifics of legal online services in Germ\"Convergence\"<\/a>any shortly.<\/p>\n

First let me sum up what I consider to be the major driver in legal online services for the next couple of years. This is what I would like to label \u201cDigital Convergence\u201d<\/em>–not the above-mentioned individual trends in the areas of content, technical infrastructure, and users\/community<\/em>, but a synergetic combination of these three trends that will drive the future of legal online services.<\/em><\/p>\n

What are the characteristics of legal online services in Germany in 2010?<\/strong><\/p>\n

First, the fact that Germany is a code-based country<\/a> 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<\/a> with more than 100 provisions each. If you think of one specific term in paragraph 4 of \u00a7 97 GWB<\/a> as a very precise reference to a specific legal issue, consider that<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. \u00a7 97 GWB is one out of more than 500,000 provisions,<\/li>\n
  2. these provisions follow a semantic structure, and<\/li>\n
  3. nearly all existing legal documents refer to specific provisions at the European, federal, state, or municipal level.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    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<\/a> in Germany already exists; we \u201conly\u201d have to apply a common syntactical representation in order to create a very rich business resource by linking millions of individual and heterogeneous documents.<\/em> The projects that share a common syntactical representation (e.g., jurMeta<\/a>) will be rich sources for additional value-adding processes such as data mining.<\/p>\n

    Second, end-users of legal documents are by nature very conscious about retrieval quality<\/a>. No matter whether they are aware of the parameters for retrieval quality such as scope, recall and precision, end users (e.g., lawyers) know that the one make-or-break case could exist; therefore the goal of any kind of information retrieval effort is to retrieve this one case but not others. To measure the relevance of retrieval results is very difficult, but determining relevance in law is far easier than in other domains. The importance of retrieval quality to end users of legal information systems is of course not specific to Germany, but is still an important driver for resource allocation in online retrieval projects. Therefore, legal research is the ideal test area for technical innovations in search and retrieval<\/a>.<\/em> Taking into account that lawyers are an attractive target group, investors will to a larger degree focus on legal research as a business opportunity.<\/em> Such investment should speed progress.<\/p>\n

    Third, an important parameter for legal online services in Germany is the availability of primary legal content (legislation and case law).\u00a0Public authorities in Germany claim copyright — at least to some extent — in official documents, and their efforts at publishing primary legal content online have been rudimentary. The existing offerings of legal content set up by state authorities<\/a> are end-user oriented and very heterogeneous. The service providers — such as this firm<\/a> — that technically publish the legal documents on behalf of the public authorities are private companies with business interests relating to legal information. Thus, allowing these companies to publish primary legal content on behalf of the public authorities is like letting the fox rule the henhouse.\u00a0 After all, official documents are the result of the tax-funded work of public authorities.<\/p>\n

    A modern publication infrastructure for primary legal content should functionally separate data collection from dissemination. Official documents should, if required, be anonymized<\/a>, and stored on servers in a well-structured format<\/a> for anybody to download either free-of-charge, or at cost of dissemination<\/em>. This would allow non-commercial projects as well as commercial users to focus on value-adding processes, rather than crawling and re-engineering data that already exists as part of proprietary collections. In economic terms, this would lead to\u00a0improved resource allocation, strengthen electronic media as tools for democratic processes<\/a>, and support the goals of the Public Sector Information Directive<\/a>.<\/p>\n

    Legal online research in Germany in 2020<\/strong><\/p>\n

    In order to analyze the impact of metadata standards on legal publishers, I will be so bold as to predict how legal online services could look in 2020:<\/p>\n