There is a shared belief that e-government policies can help turning regulatory compliance less costly, thus improving the regulatory environment that surrounds economic growth. While there is a growing volume of literature assessing the economic, political, ans social benefits of a good regulatory environment, the effects of online access to legal information on both governance and the business environment have been so far unexplored. On one hand, the Doing Business indicators are produced under the assumption of full availability of information on the procedures needed to set up a business. On the other, despite the cost of regulatory information discovery looms large for businesses, institutional economics literature has not yet provided a model for these specific costs of information discovery. Therefore, the design and implementation of measures for online access to legal and regulatory information proves much needed to gain insights into the costs of information discovery and their effects on the regulatory environment for policy reform that are simply unavailable to us using current methods. This paper makes two main contributions. First, it provides a model for the costs of discovery of legal information and an empirical test of the relationship between governmental online presence and legal publication, on one hand, and the quality of the regulatory environment, on the other. Second, it shows that current measures of access to legal information are in need of improvement and presents a composite indicator to measure the costs of online access to legal information.

It is commonly accepted that transparency can make political institutions more effective, improve economic development, enforce accountability, and increase the quality of democracy. The recent expansion of the Internet around the world has led governments and organizations to emphasize the role of online access to public information and data in fostering accountability of public processes, and public participation. The empirical assessment of the benefits of eGovernment on governance has been limited by the lack of systematic data, but the recent publication of the UN eGovernment Survey offers the possibility to use cross-sectional data to assess the role of eGovernment. This paper combines cross-sectional data from the UN eGovernment Survey and the World Bank Governance Indicators to explore the impact of governmental online initiatives on different aspects of governance. Our research shows that although some of the optimistic views regarding the potential benefits of eGovernment policies are well grounded, the nature of a political regime is a key factor to qualify the effects of eGovernment.

The application of Linked Open Data (LOD) principles to legal information (URI naming of resources, assertions about named relationships between resources or between resources and data values, and the possibility to easily extend, update and modify these relationships and resources) could offer better access and understanding of regulatory information to individual citizens, businesses and government agencies and administrations, and allow its sharing and reuse across applications, organizations and jurisdictions.

This paper describes the application of Semantic Web and Linked Data techniques and principles to regulatory information for the development of a SKOS vocabulary for the Code of Federal Regulations (in particular of Title 21, Food and Drugs). The Code of Federal Regulations is the codification of the general and permanent enacted rules generated by executive departments and agencies of the Federal Government of the United States, a regulatory corpus of large size, varied subject-matter and structural complexity. The CFR SKOS vocabulary is developed using a bottom-up approach for the extraction of terminology from text based on a combination of syntactic analysis and lexico-syntactic pattern matching. Although the preliminary results are promising, several issues (a method for hierarchy cycle control, expert evaluation and control support, named entity reduction, and adjective and prepositional modifier trimming) require improvement and revision before it can be implemented for search and retrieval enhacement of regulatory materials published by the Legal Information Institute. The vocabulary is part of a larger Linked Legal Data project, that aims at using Semantic Web technologies for the representation and management of legal data.

The application of Linked Open Data (LOD) principles to legal information (URI naming of resources, assertions about named relationships between resources or between resources and data values, and the possibility to easily extend, update and modify these relationships and resources) could offer better access and understanding of regulatory information to individual citizens, businesses and government agencies and administrations, and allow its sharing and reuse across applications, organizations and jurisdictions.

The technological threatens to the right of privacy are not only limited to data bases. WBSN and pervasive computer, for instance, are two clear examples of other privacy risks. WBSN have an economic value, and more and more tools focus on WBSN users’ personal information. On the contrary, WBSN privacy is only a new research area. Internet communities are trust-based systems. Therefore, they need a privacy-respecting reputation system. Transparency tools should also allow individuals to check at any desired moment what personal data has been given to the data systems, and be able to alter or delete it. IT researchers usually consider privacy as a quantifiable attribute that can be negotiated and possibly exchanged by individuals in return for certain benefits. On the contrary, PET are necessary in WBSN. Thus, they cannot simply be individual options. Human rights, as public policies, should be preserved in the design of IT tools.

This research discusses preliminary results on the study of the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) and its related thesaurus, the Thesaurus of Indexing Terms. In particular, it analyzes the distribution of the indexing terms of the Thesaurus, assigned by Federal agencies, among the different CFR titles, and compares this distribution with respect to the content of CFR headings. In order to assess the extent to which the indexing terms and the content of the CFR headings are equally representative of the content of a CFR title, we use a scaling method, the document scaling algorithm Wordfish, that will deliver the position of each CFR title with respect to a one-dimensional space. Results show that although there is in general a strong correlation between the scores received by the CFR titles in both experiments, the existence of mismatches suggests that part of the corpus of indexing terms could not be representative of the actual content of the CFR titles based on the analysis of their headings. These initial findings regarding latent structure patterns within the text of the Code of Federal Regulations could offer further research paths on the relationship between legal complexity and rulemaking behavior.

This paper shows the multiple relationships between empirical data and semantic content in the legal field. One of the well-known problems of ontology construction is the “knowledge acquisition bottleneck problem” pointed out many years ago by Edward Feigenbaum and others. This problem has not been completely solved in the next generation of Semantic Web developments. It is our contention that both an accurate description of the legal environment and well-grounded previous sociological studies may help to address it in a more satisfactory way. This means adopting a user-centered approach to legal ontologies, in what we will call an “iterative and integrated pragmatic cycle” involving legal theorists, socio-legal researchers, professional people (lawyers, magistrates, prosecutors…) and computer scientists. We describe the example of how the ontology of iuriservice was built up.

The online publication of legal materials by governments and administrations is not recent, nevertheless, nowadays some of these materials are being made available in machine readable formats, and follow the Linked Open Data principles: URI naming of resources, assertions about named relationships between resources or between resources and data values, and the possibility to easily extend, update and modify these relationships and resources.The combination of the publication of legislation, regulations, judicial cases, or administrative decisions as Linked Open Legal Data together with the availability of legal OWL/RDF ontologies and SKOS thesauri, could offer new possibilities to enhance not only access but also understanding of legal information.

The previous overview of legal ontologies and the detailed description of the conceptualization and formalization process of the Ontology of Professional Judicial Knowledge, together with the proposal of the socio-legal methodological approach raise several issues, discussed in this chapter, which include the integration of bottom-up and top-down approaches in the development of legal ontologies, or the usability-reusability trade-offs.

What is the purpose of legal ontologies? This chapter reviews existing legal ontologies, their objectives, characteristics, methodological approaches, to offer an extensive account and analysis of the state-of-the art and trends in legal ontology development.

This chapter is devoted to the description of the development process of an ontology that represents professional judicial knowledge, including a detailed description of the knowledge acquisition step, conceptualization and formalization steps, and the different ontology evaluation techniques explored. A socio-legal approach to the development of legal ontologies is proposed.

Online communities and institutions create new spaces for interaction, but also open new avenues for the emergence of grievances, claims, and disputes. Consequently, online dispute resolution (ODR) procedures are core to these new online worlds. But can ODR mechanisms provide sufficient levels of reputation, trust, and enforceability for it to become mainstream? This contribution introduces the new approaches to ODR and provides a description of the design and structure of Ontomedia, a web-based platform to facilitate online mediation in different domains.

How do we build an ontology? This chapter offers a review of some of the most important ontology development methodologies, tools and languages, and suggests an expert-based approach to the development of professional knowledge-based legal ontologies.

The Internet and Information Systems evolution have dramatically increased the amount of information hold by governments and companies. This information can be very sensitive, specially regarding personal data, so governments and industries promote acts and guidelines in order to ensure privacy and data security. Thus, companies have to consider legal and Information Technology (IT) compliance. Nevertheless, compliance assessment is still a manual task performed by experts, but steps towards an automated compliance assessment, both in IT and legal, are in progress. In this paper we introduce the Neurona framework, a software application based on legal and security ontologies that aims at providing organizations with legal compliance support.

This paper describes the analysis of the requirements and the knowledge acquisition process for the development of a legal ontology for the representation of data protection knowledge in the framework of the NEURONA project. This modular ontology is used in the NEURONA application to reason about the correctness of the measures of protection applied to these data files by an organization. In this sense the use of legal ontologies could not only provide legal professionals and citizens with better access to legal information, but could also support data protection and privacy compliance in organizations and administrations.