BO-ECLI
Objectives

1. The first objective of the project is to (further) introduce ECLI into the case law repositories of Belgium, Italy, Greece, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Germany, Estonia and Croatia and to connect them to the ECLI Search Engine of the European e-Justice Portal (‘ESE-EEJP’).
2. The second objective is to improve the accessibility of case law documents by making the legal references therein computer readable. Legal professionals often want to query case law by the references to other legal sources they contain. However, since these references are often just plain text and are not in conformity with existing citation guidelines, search results are generally very poor. By structuring and standardizing these references searches can be made much more accurate. Within BO-ECLI solutions that already exist at the national level will be analyzed and a common infrastructure and an open source software toolkit will be developed.
3. The third objective is to assess whether the current ECLI standards needs improvement to guarantuee its compatibility with other semantic web standards – like RDFa, Akoma Ntoso and the European Legislation Identifier (ELI) – and to develop ‘ECLI 2.0’ which should both be future-proof as well as fully backwards compatible with the current ‘ECLI 1.0’.
4. The fourth objective of BO-ECLI is to assess quantitative and qualitative aspects of the publication of judicial decisions within the Member States of the European Union and to develop policy guidelines thereon, especially regarding the selection of cases to be published, data protection issues and the availability of case law document for re-use. As a result more decisions should be published, and they should be better accessible.
5. Last but not least, the fifth objective of BO-ECLI is to address the lack of knowledge on ECLI within the legal community and other interest groups. The project will spread the word on its benefits amongst legal professionals, press, academics, legal publishers and legal informaticians.