BestPortal: Lessons Learned in
Lightweight Semantic Access to Court
Proceedings
Rinke HOEKSTRA a,b
a AI Department, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
b Leibniz Center for Law, Universiteit van Amsterdam
Abstract. The BestPortal is part of an initiative that aims to improve the ability of
citizens to determine their legal position. Publishing court proceedings is a natural
step to improve access and transparency of the legal system. We discuss the lim-
itations of both such an ‘open data’ approach, and of more traditional knowledge
intensive approaches, and present a flexible mechanism that allows us to bridge the
gap between legal and layman conceptualisations of the world. This approach has
been implemented as a publicly accessible portal and uses the BestMap ontology
to define mappings between the two vocabularies.
Keywords. open data, linked data, ontology, Semantic Web, government data, court
proceedings, OWL, SKOS, vocabulary, information retrieval, mapping, data.gov
1. Introduction
The need to share and improve access to government data is currently acknowledged
around the globe. Government data encompasses a wide variety of information types,
such as business registries, population statistics, crime statistics, environmental hazards,
medical information etc. See for instance the DATA.GOV portal of the US government,
or the UK national statistics publication hub.1 Other countries boast similar initiatives.
This information disclosure differs from more traditional eGovernment approaches as
these focus primarily on the improvement of access to government services rather than
data. Publishing just raw data can be very helpful indeed, but it does put te burden of
data interpretation on external parties.
In this paper we focus on the public disclosure of court proceedings. Publishing
court proceedings is a natural step to improve access and transparency of the legal sys-
tem. However, it begs the question as to for whom access and transparency is improved.
One goal certainly is to alleviate the burden of the judiciary in having to deal with ei-
ther hopeless cases, or disputes that could easily be resolved through mediation or other
forms of alternative dispute resolution. If parties have a better understanding of their le-
gal position, of their chance of success in court, then this may prove to be a good thing
for both citizens and the judiciary alike.
1Respectively http://www.data.gov and http://www.statistics.gov.uk/hub/

Traditionally, laymen seek the advice of legal professionals in helping them to de-
termine their position. This is not only expensive, it also introduces a (seeming) perver-
sion as the legal profesional will benefit financially by taking a case to court. The impor-
tant question, therefore, is whether making court proceedings publicly available really
supports the general public in providing sorely needed legal guidance?
The BestPortal aims to improve the ability of citizens to determine their legal po-
sition.2 This is done first by developing a portal that allows the “Man on the Clapham
omnibus” – our typical reasonably educated layman – to find relevant case law, and as-
sess whether his case has any chance in court.3 In other words, it enables him to become
aware of his best alternative to a negotiated agreement, his BATNA. The main reason for
going to court is to attain a better situation than that which would otherwise come about.
If you are not aware of this ‘status quo’ situation, you run the risk of either achieving an
outcome that you should have avoided, or missing out on an outcome that would have
left you better off.
We discuss that for this to work, the system will have to provide a service rather than
just the data, pinpointing the limitations of government open data initiatives and of more
traditional knowledge intensive approaches (section 2 and section 3). Based on extensive
experience (section 4), we present a flexible mechanism that allows us to bridge the gap
between legal and layman conceptualisations of the world (section 5). This approach has
been implemented as a publicly accessible portal and uses the BestMap ontology of [3]
to define mappings between the two vocabularies.
2. Open Data
An important first step towards open government is to publish public government data on
the web. In other words, a government should take a pro-active role in disclosing its in-
formation: citizens should be able to access the information without interfacing through
a government official. The accessibility of this information is furthermore enhanced if
the government uses non-proprietary file formats, provides a means to browse and search
through the data – e.g. using a catalog – and accompanies the data with short descriptions
(summary, publication date, originating institution etc.).4 Furthermore, uniquely identi-
fiable government data is a requirement for “Government 2.0”, i.e. a government that
actively stimulates citizen’s involvement in augmenting, reusing and recombining data
in innovative ways – e.g. the Government 2.0 taskforce of the Australian government.5
The approach of the Dutch government is currently not as ambitious compared
to the 2.0 approach. However, it does publish its laws and court proceedings online
(http://www.wetten.nl and http://www.rechtspraak.nl respectively).
The court proceedings are collected by the Netherlands Council of the Judiciary, have
unique identifiers (the ’LJN’), and the rechtspraak.nl website currently offers search on
several fields, including full text search on the body of proceedings.
2BEST: BATNA Establishment using Semantic Web Technology, see http://www.best-project.
nl
3Officially, the Man on the Clapham omnibus is ‘the reasonable person’, a hypothetical person against whom
a defendant’s conduct may be judged in an in English law civil action for negligence.
4See e.g. the W3C eGov interest group’s group note on Data.gov.*, http://www.w3.org/2007/
eGov/IG/wiki/Main_Page.
5See http://gov2.net.au/