ALST Archive
Activities
The increasing importance of
global communication in the legal field has reached a critical level where the
mere and simple use of the English language (as a means of communication) is no
longer enough. In facts, legal sources and databases available on the
web are generally accessible in national languages or in English (mostly as the
national language of English speaking countries). To date, no existing tool
offers a crosscutting multilingual access to legal sources from
countries with different national languages. Thus, tools for dealing with legal
linguistic barriers are dramatically scarce and very much needed.
The Multilingual Archive of
the Law of Science and New Technologies (ALST) offers an original solution, for
the following reasons:
· It is a multilingual legal platform that collects legal material (legislation,
case law and much more) in their original language.
· It is based on an evolving multilingual legal thesaurus.
· It connects material drafted in different languages.
· It makes them available to everybody, whatever is the language used in the
query.
· It suggests unexpected connections among multilingual material not foreseeable
by the user, improving research abilities.
The main goal of ALST is to
make different legal entities interoperable, ensuring to foster a dialogue, but
also to preserve their own languages and cultural background.
ALST needs to evolve from a
successful prototype (as it is now, with more than ten languages already in
use) to a fully operative platform where a semi-controlled wiki system works
and contributes to the creation of an active transnational community of lawyers
and citizens.