Estrella

From EstrellaWiki

The European project for Standardized Transparent Representations in order to Extend Legal Accessibility (Estrella, IST-2004-027655) aims to develop and validate an open, standards-based platform allowing public administrations to develop and deploy comprehensive legal knowledge management solutions, without becoming dependent on proprietary products of particular vendors. Estrella will support, in an integrated way, both legal document management and legal knowledge-based systems, to provide a complete solution for improving the quality and efficiency of the determinative processes of public administration requiring the application of complex legislation and other legal sources. Estrella will facilitate a market of interoperable components for legal knowledge-based systems, allowing public administrations and other users to freely choose among competing development environments, inference engines, and other tools.

The main technical objectives of the Estrella project are to develop a Legal Knowledge Interchange Format (LKIF), building upon emerging XML-based standards of the Semantic Web, including RDF and OWL, and Application Programmer Interfaces (APIs) for interacting with legal knowledge-based systems. To achieve and demonstrate vendor neutrality and independence, translators between the LKIF format and the existing proprietary formats of LKBS vendors participating in the project will be developed.

To demonstrate and validate the Estrella platform, European tax related legislation and national tax legislation of two European countries will be modelled and used in the pilot applications. The finance ministries or tax administrations of several other European countries will take part in an Observatory Board to ensure generality of the approach.

Please follow the ongoing discussion on matters dealing with:

• Workpackage 1: Legal Knowledge Interchange Format,
• Workpackage 3: Managing legal sources.

Estrella members can post links to interesting pages on this wiki or somewhere else on the Posterboard

Partners

Universiteit van Amsterdam*

Prof. Tom M. van Engers (vanEngers_[at]_uva.nl) [1]
Dr. Radboud Winkels (Winkels_[at]_uva.nl

Universita di Bologna

Prof. Giovanni Sartor (sartor_[at]_cirsfid.unibo.it) [2]

The University of Liverpool

Prof. Trevor Bench-Capon (tbc_[at]_csc.liv.ac.uk) [3]

Fraunhofer FOKUS

Dr. Thomas Gordon (thomas-frederick.gordon_[at]_fokus.fraunhofer.de) [4]

Rulewise B.V.

Hans Kamphuis (h.kamphuis_[at]_oi.nl) [5]

RuleBurst (EUROPE) LIMITED

Peter Still (peter.still_[at]_ruleburst.com) [6]

Knowledgetools International GMBH

Samir Sekkat (samir.sekkat_[at]_knowledgetools.de) [7]

Interaction Design Limited

Frank Wilson (fwilson_[at]_i-d.co.uk) [8]

SOGEI - Societa General d'Informatica S.P.A.

Domenico Natale dnatale_[at]_sogei.it) [9]

Centro Nazionale per l’Informatica nella Pubblica Amministrazione (CNIPA)

Caterina Lupo (lupo_[at]_cnipa.it) [10]

Hungarian Tax and Financial Control Administration

Prof. Ivan Futo (futo.ivan_[at]_apeh.hu) [11]

Budapesti Corvinius Egyetem - Budapest

Andrés Gábor (gabor_[at]_informatika.bkae.hu) [12]

Ministerio dell'Economia e delle Finanze

Sergio Baldelli (Sergio.baldelli_[at]_FINANZE.it) [13]

Consorzio Pisa Ricerche SCARL

Paolo Mascellani (p.mascellani_[at]_cpr.it) [14]

*) Coordinating Partner