{"id":320,"date":"2010-11-02T09:25:18","date_gmt":"2010-11-02T14:25:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/voxpop\/2010\/11\/02\/the-jumas-experience-extracting-knowledge-from-judicial-multimedia-digital-libraries\/"},"modified":"2010-11-02T12:58:51","modified_gmt":"2010-11-02T17:58:51","slug":"the-jumas-experience-extracting-knowledge-from-judicial-multimedia-digital-libraries","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/voxpop\/2010\/11\/02\/the-jumas-experience-extracting-knowledge-from-judicial-multimedia-digital-libraries\/","title":{"rendered":"The JUMAS Experience: Extracting Knowledge From Judicial Multimedia Digital Libraries"},"content":{"rendered":"

THE JUDICIAL CONTEXT: WHY INNOVATE?<\/font><\/strong><\/p>\n

The progressive deployment of information and communication technologies (ICT) in the courtroom (audio and video recording, document scanning, courtroom management systems), jointly with the requirement for paperless judicial folders pushed by e-justice<\/a> plans (Council of the European Union, 2009)<\/a>, are quickly transforming the traditional judicial folder into an integrated multimedia folder, where documents, audio recordings and video recordings can be accessed, usually via a Web-based platform. This trend is leading to a continuous increase in the number and the volume of case-related digital judicial libraries<\/a>, where the full content of each single hearing is available for online consultation. A typical trial folder contains: audio hearing recordings, audio\/video hearing recordings, transcriptions of hearing recordings, hearing reports, and attached documents (scanned text documents, photos, evidences, etc.). The ICT container is typically a dedicated judicial content management system (court management system), usually physically separated and independent from the case management system used in the investigative phase, but interacting with it.<\/p>\n

Most of the present ICT deployment has been focused on the deployment of case management systems and ICT equipment in the courtrooms, with content management systems at different organisational levels (court or district). ICT deployment in the judiciary has reached different levels in the various EU countries, but the trend toward full e-justice is clearly in progress. Accessibility of the judicial information, both of case registries (more widely deployed), and of case e-folders, has been strongly enhanced by state-of-the-art ICT technologies. Usability of the electronic judicial folders is still affected by a traditional support toolset, such that an information search is limited to text search, transcription of audio recordings (indispensable for text search) is still a slow and fully manual process, template filling is a manual activity, etc. Part of the information available in the trial folder is not yet directly usable, but requires a time-consuming manual search. Information embedded in audio and video recordings, describing not only what was said in the courtroom, but also the specific trial context and the way in which it was said, still needs to be exploited. While the information is there, information extraction and semantically empowered judicial information retrieval still wait for proper exploitation tools. The growing amount of digital judicial information calls for the development of novel knowledge management techniques and their integration into case and court management systems. In this challenging context a novel case and court management system has been recently proposed.<\/p>\n

The JUMAS project<\/a> (JUdicial MAnagement by digital libraries Semantics) was started in February 2008, with the support of the Polish<\/a> and Italian Ministries of Justice<\/a>. JUMAS seeks to realize better usability of multimedia judicial folders — including transcriptions, information extraction, and semantic search –to provide to users a powerful toolset able to fully address the knowledge embedded in the multimedia judicial folder.<\/p>\n

The JUMAS project has several objectives:<\/p>\n