Semantic Spaces and Multilingualism in the Law: The Challenge of Legal Knowledge Management

It is the concern of the author to arrange cogitations and experiences she gained by collaborating in relevant international project works, by conducting scientific studies regarding legal knowledge representation and by teaching legal information retrieval. The main focus is the demonstration of problems of communication within and between humans and legal information systems, which are often hidden, overlooked or ignored. The author uses the concept "semantic spaces" to describe and explain semantic related difficulties detected in legal knowledge bases and data retrieval. Realization of these various semantic spaces might help further work in this area. Emphasis is also placed on the problem of multilingualism and diversity of legal cultures in EU legislation. The practical examples of the EU tools N-Lex and EUROVOC are used to illustrate the various situations, the current limits and the specific requirements and information needs in multilingual and cross-national legal information retrieval.