ManyLaws

On 18 and 19 March 2021, ManyLaws will organise a final online workshop where participants will get the opportunity to access, interact with and evaluate the ManyLaws portal.

Aiming to facilitate access to legal information and improve the effectiveness of legislative decision-making, the ManyLaws portal provides advanced search, retrieval and visualization of legal data from three European legal contexts: Greece (Greek laws and parliamentary data), Austria (Austrian laws and parliamentary data) and Europe (EUR-Lex data).

This year, the 24th IRIS Conference will take place online under the leading topic of Cybergovernance. ManyLaws consortium members will present the project in two sessions.

In 2020, the Greek supercomputer, ARIS, supported ManyLaws with generating more than 11 million datasets now available on the portal.

As our societies continue to digitalise, with larger and larger amounts of data constantly being generated, high-performance computing (HPC), or supercomputing, has emerged as a key tool to address data-intensive tasks. Legal information published by EU Member States in their respective languages amounts to vast amounts of data that are far beyond the capacity of a simple desktop computer to analyse.

The final release of the ManyLaws platform is fast approaching! Feedback from stakeholders during the first piloting phase provided the development team with key input for the optimisation and fine-tuning of the prototype over the coming months.

From 18 December 2020 to 15 January 2021, ManyLaws engaged in the first of two piloting phases to test the platform before its final launch in Spring this year.

Making legal information broadly available and easily accessible are key priorities for the ManyLaws project. These efforts will be reinforced by the European Data Portal’s harvesting of ManyLaws data, starting in January 2021.

The European Data Portal (EDP) was launched in 2015 to gather the metadata of Public Sector Information available on public data portals across European countries. Its overall aim is to increase the impact of open data by making it easy to find and re-use by everyone, paving the way for the EU as a role model for a society empowered by data.

The ManyLaws platform aims to facilitate access to legal information by delivering a suite of services capitalizing on text mining, semantic extraction and advanced visualization of EU, Austrian and Greek laws.

On 22^nd of September, in the context of the 13^th edition of the International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance (ICEGOV), ManyLaws organized an online interactive workshop to present and demonstrate the next generation legal informatics, information retrieval and search platform of ManyLaws.

The workshop was chaired by the project’s Technical Coordinator Dr. Sofia Tsekeridou (INTRASOFT International S.A.). Several project partners gave presentations and contributed to group discussions:

The 13th edition of the International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance (ICEGOV) will take place, online, on 22-25 September 2020. The ManyLaws project supports this 13th edition of the ICEGOV conference, which is sponsored by a number of ManyLaws’ project partners. The ICEGOV conference is jointly organized by the University of the Aegean, the Harokopio University of Athens and the United Nations University (UNU-EGOV).

On 15 July, in the context of the 10th Samos Summit on ICT-enabled Governance, ManyLaws organized an online scenario-based workshop, including a live demonstration of the initial release features of the ManyLaws platform.

The workshop was chaired by the project’s Technical Coordinator Dr. Sofia Tsekeridou (Intrasoft International), while all project partners contributed to its success.

Legal data and semantic annotation services through text mining are at the core of the ManyLaws project.

It is estimated that a pan-European legal database will contain more than 1 trillion words in 21 different languages, corresponding to about 10 million volumes of classical books. Moreover, another 5 000 such volumes will be included for study on a daily basis.