New on VoxPopuLII: Bock on The Impact of Metadata Standards on Traditional Legal Online Services in Germany

Dr. Andreas Bock of kjur.de has posted The Impact of Metadata Standards on Traditional Legal Online Services in Germany, on the VoxPopuLII Blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School.

In his post, Dr. Bock argues that metadata standards — such as the new jurMeta standard — will play a vital role in emerging online legal information services. Dr. Bock begins by describing the current state of online legal publishing in Germany, and identifies as key factors the increasing availability of primary law on the free Web, an abundance of free open source software, the effectiveness of legal online social networks, and the potential for major advances in legal information retrieval. He notes that these factors are pushing the online legal information environment in the direction of greater public access to legal information, in ways consistent with the goals of the eGovernment / eParticipation movement and the EU’s Public Sector Information Directive.

Dr. Bock then predicts how the German digital legal information environment will develop in the next decade. He contends that the current trends in electronic legal publishing will usher in a future legal information environment characterized by low barriers to entry, and a very large number of service providers offering a great variety of services, including both fee-based and free-of-charge offerings, and ranging from barebones retrieval systems to sophisticated expert systems. Dr. Bock also speculates on the ability of established legal publishers to adapt to this new, more competitive and innovative environment.

Dr. Bock asserts that in this emerging digital legal information space, metadata standards will play a key role in connecting primary legal resources with the knowledge representation technologies of the legal Semantic Web.

Dr. Bock’s post will be of particular interest to developers and administrators of legal information systems who seek guidance about the future of this information domain. This post will also be of interest to those seeking a better understanding of the digital legal information landscape in Germany.

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