Facilitating Public Access to Legal Information

Abstract

The European legal system is multi-layered and complex, and large quantities of legal documentation have been produced since its inception. This has significant ramifications for European society, whose various constituent actors require regular access to accurate and timely legal information, and often struggle with basic comprehension of legalese. The project focused on within this paper proposes to develop a suite of usercentric services that will ensure the real–time provision and visualisation of legal information to citizens, businesses and administrations based on a platform supported by the proper environment for semantically annotated Big Open Legal Data (BOLD). The objective of this research paper is to critically explore how current user activity interacts with the components of the proposed project platform through the development of a conceptual model. Model Driven Design (MDD) is employed to describe the proposed project architecture, complemented by the use of the Agent Oriented Modelling (AOM) technique based on UML (Unified Modelling Language) user activity diagrams to develop both the proposed platform’s user requirements and show the dependencies that exist between the different components that make up the proposed system.