Economic development and scientific and technological prospects

 

Dissemination of project results has a key value in the overall success of the Project since, from a business perspective, it is essential to pass on the lessons learnt to the legal community to ensure their take-up of the dictionary concept.

 

Basically, the dissemination strategy will be three-fold:

1.       The consortium will set up a Project Web site where information on the Project will be made available. The Web site will be constantly maintained and upgraded as the Project progresses. At a later stage, when actual results are available, Web-based dissemination may take a more marketing-oriented focus as several Web-oriented strategies could be adopted (such as banner campaigns, free software downloads, etc.).

2.       The consortium will convene a one-day convention to report the results of the project.  Members of the legal profession from across Europe and other project stakeholders will be invited to attend.

3.       They will also take opportunities to present the outcomes at most relevant national and international events. These events may be industry-oriented as well as research-oriented. Events organised by the European Commission will be specifically taken into account.

 

Dissemination activities will, of course, be performed with the support of various dissemination materials such as brochures, white papers, etc. These materials will be made constantly available to the European Commission and to the general public. It is expected that, through dissemination, opportunities will arise to collaborate with other EC-funded projects in a co-ordination framework.  Full details of the activities will be determined in work package 7.

 

Dissemination activities are, quite obviously, closely linked with opportunities for exploitation of project results. The code for the demonstrator will be delivered as open source and made available on the web site. This will provide the primary opportunity for take-up and exploitation both within the legal domain and also in other domains.

 

A major outcome of the RDF-Dictionary will be its significant contribution to standardisation and establishing of international norms in the exchange of legal data.  This can be done in conjunction with the LEXML project.  LEXML, is the European network which coordinates the standardisation process in the legal domain in Europe (http://www.lexml.de) and LegalXML, theAmerican counterpart (http://www.legalxml.org) cooperate in the development of such an interface. An open source project for the development of a "Multi-language and Multi-jurisdictional RDF Dictionary" is hosted by LEXML and Sourceforge (http:rdf.lexml.de) and contains a first draft for the core of the RDF Dictionary. The Dictionary Workgroup of Legal XML is developing an RDF Dictionary for their market. The cooperation between the two projects is to lead to an open source global RDF Dictionary, which will enable worldwide exchange of legal data across language and jurisdiction borders.

 

Dissemination of project results has a key value in the overall success of the project and so the RDF-Dictionary consortium will guarantee the dissemination and exploitation of information to the entire stakeholder group.  The early engagement of this group is therefore crucial hence the inclusion and timing of work package 2.