Legislative Databases: Current Problems and Possible Solutions

Abstract

Legislative databases are a well‐established information source for the legal professional. However, current legislative databases struggle with important problems. The manual updating of the texts and their reference data that are necessary for an effective consultation of the databases is very expensive and does not always guarantee the correctness of the retrieved texts. These findings are based upon the experience with the Agora‐Lex project, which has developed a model and prototype for managing historical versions of Belgian legislation. A valuable solution to the maintenance problems of the databases is more automation in the lifecycle of legislation. This can be achieved by the official electronic publication of the legislation including the texts and the reference data and by incorporating intelligent techniques for drafting, indexing and hypertext linking. Such an approach would allow for an automated update of the texts and the reference data in the databases. Belgian legislation is a perfect test case for legislative databases because it is a multilingual state having different governments and consequently different areas of application of the statutes. As any other civil law country, Belgian legislation is subject to many modifications.