The role of semantic web in the management of legal data

Modern Web is the most important source of legal information: it contains legislative texts, case-law, doctrine, drafts and outdated laws from all over the world. The amount of such materials keeps growing with time, while their availability to wide audience presents a significant problem as it remains hard to find, process, analyze and systematize them. This leads to an ‘information deficit’ paradox: despite there being plenty of relevant data, it is at times impossible to make proper use of it. One of the possible solutions is the further development of Semantic Web – an extension of the current Internet structure relying on logical concepts and correlations between events, and making use of specific ontologies. The application of such technologies in the legal field may permit faster and more precise search, easier reasoning, storage and use of data as well as automatic resolution of disputes by relying on the previous case-law systematized in a machine-understandable format