Managing large, structured, and annotated documents: A study of three operational cases in the field of environmental legislation

Abstract

Managing legal documents, in the specific context of European environmental legislation, raise specific problems like internationalization and version management of the contents and metadata, and the need to perform tasks as consolidation, annotation, and description of the contents, at the scale of elementary fragment (article or chapter), instead of the whole document. Current standards as METS, or more specialized formats like HL7 / CDA, are not well adapted to answer these specific problems. In this paper, we present a new data model and an innovative structure of document, based on the "object" concept of descriptor. This development is now fully operational, and serves three important knowledge bases totalizing more than 11 millions of requests during the past year. © Springer-Verlag 2009.