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By Ingrid Cantwell - October 2001
The general goal of the ELVIL project 2000 [1] is to create and operate a Portal to European Law and Politics and provide tools to facilitate the accessibility of public information in the European public sphere. Ingrid Cantwell of Stockholm University Library outlines the three main problem areas (access, learning and communication within European law and politics) the project is currently dealing with.
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The ELVIL application increases the availability of information by integrating a wide range of legislative computer based resources using the Z39.50 protocol and by supplying a point-and-click graphical interface. The intended users of the site consists of graduate and undergraduate students, teachers, librarians, media and the general public. The tools developed and experiences gained in the project will be further exploited in the ELVIL nexus. The chief objective of nexus is to work towards an increased openness and accessibility of the European public sphere by promoting the idea of the nexus civic network (ncn). This will be achieved by licensing the ELVIL nexus publishing tools as well as by running a central Web site, which will act as the central node of the network. By signing on to a nexus partner-program, organisations agree on enhancing their existing Web sites with the nexus publishing tools. The resulting nexus civic network can be conceived as a decentralised information- and knowledge-producing network institutionally based in the European civil society. It will thus strengthen the possibilities for the ELVIL 2000 platform to become a main provider of public information as well as a main resource for refining and adding value to such information. The experiences and results of the project will also be exploited by the participant partners in different ways.
The project has produced software gateways to the parliamentary databases of the Czech Republic and Poland. The prototype gateway for Rixlex, Polis and Epoque (Epoque is no longer an operational database, it has been relaced by EUROParl) developed in the ELVIL project is included in the portal. The software support package developed within the project will facilitate the inclusion of a large number of parliamentary databases in the future by shortening development time and reducing cost. Multilingual support can further be provided by using EUROVOC as a language switchboard to the different national thesauri.
The ELVIL 2000 project has used technologies exploiting the concept of Autonomous agents to aid both users and administrators in identifying high quality Web-resources on European law and Politics.
The project has explored the potentials of electronic democracy by building an electronic democracy platform where current legislative issues can be debated by selected groups of users in a structured manner. By the project´s development of support packages for interest groups it will be easy for groups to form deliberative fora structured around the available information in the ELVIL 2000 platform.
Accessibility to information on European Law and Politics has been further facilitated by new educational modules covering the Catalan (as examples of regional polities), as well as The Czech and Polish polities (as examples of CEE polities) at a detailed level. A number of other countries in Europe has been dealt with at a more summarized level. A prototype is available at online.
The ELVIL project started from a real felt need. On the floor of Stockholm University Library when teaching students of politics we saw the need to enforce and extend pedagogic methods outside the classroom and on to the Web. We also saw the need and possibilities to facilitate the access to European law and politics to students and the general public and the opportunity to work for a closer integration of the study of law and politics on the Web.
In 1995 a project group with members from the Department of Politics, the Law Faculty, the Library and the Swedish Parliament was formed to write a proposal for a project to the Telematics, Library Programme of the European Commission. The ELVIL project was finished in July 1999 and the current ELVIL 2000 is a continuation project to ELVIL.
The consortium working with ELVIL 2000 is Stockholm University as co-ordinating partner, De Montfort University and Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. The Swedish Parliament and its library is a partner providing the Swedish parliamentary database and taking part in the development. Context in London provides Polis, the English Parliament´s database and the European Parliament provides EPOQUE for the project. Libraries involved in the project are Stockholm University Library, the Swedish Parliamentary Library, Örebro Public Library, and libraries of Diputacio de Barcelona. New parliament partners in the ELVIL 2000 project are the Parliament of the Czech Republic and the Sejm, the Polish Parliament. New library partners are Stockholm Public Library and the Library of the European Commission.
So in the project, funded by the European Commission, universities, libraries, publishers and parliaments worktogether to make European law and politics easily accessible for the citizens and students of Europe.
ELVIL is addressing three distinct user groups: citizens in general, teacher/students, media and professionals, all in need of:
The development of tools for communication, collaboration and debating on the WWW in close integration with easy access to parliamentary documentation and multimedia educational tools offers a unique potential for developing new means for citizen participation.
In this article I will concentrate on the three main problem areas in the ELVIL project: access, learning and communication within European law and politics.
ELVIL has developed access to a number of the most important databases within the field. In the centre are parliamentary databases. In the prototype we work with Rixlex, The Swedish Parliament´s database, Polis, the database of the House of Commons, Epoque the database of the European parliament (only a subset of Epoque which is no longer an operational database) and the Czech and Polish parliamentary databases.
These databases differ in that they reflect the different traditions of parliamentary procedures, they differ in database format, search interface and hardware, but they can now be searched in the same way due to the Z39.50 gateway that was developed in the ELVIL project. The standard used for mapping the databases is GILS (Government Information Locator Service).
You can search each database separately or you can do a comparative search in several databases. You can follow a debate in for instance Rixlex, have your search question translated and search the English database to see how the issue was treated in the English parliament and finally go to EPOQUE and see how the question was dealt with in the European Parliament
The pragmatic goal of ELVIL is thus to provide a single, WWW-based user interface to these databases. For this the Z39.50 protocol was chosen. Arriving at a common model for representing the contents of the participating databases has been one of the major challenges facing the project, while a the same time being vital to its long-term success. The notion of creating a unified interface to the national parliamentary databases rests on the assumption that their contents are similar enough in nature that such a common model can be found. During the course of the project, this assumption was put to the test. It has turned out that the task of finding a common reference model which can at least partially express the contents of all parliamentary databases is a difficult one. Although the contents and similar semantic concepts can be compared between the databases, the field and database structure and parliamentary practice is so different, so that only a few fields can be used in the parallell search. Thus making the ELVIL format useful for a general search.
It is obvious that ELVIL cannot hope to arrive at a model extensive enough to encompass all parliamentary databases - not even those participating in the pilot study. To improve interoperability, ELVIL has attempted to find a common subset of fields and categories that are reasonably generic across the selected databases.
During the course of ELVIL 2000, the process of adding new resources, and executing the phases described above, have been formalised into a “cookbook” or guide to new implementors. The cookbook gathers information relevant to ELVIL virtual library resource developers in a single place, in attempt to simplify the process of doing this. The guidelines can be downloaded from the ELVIL 2000 home-page, together with guidelines for other ELVIL 2000 development.
Linguistic problems are obvious and not easily solved when trying to retrieve documents in the European languages. We have chosen to implement a language switch board which acts as an aid when searching across several languages. A Swedish user can search in Swedish in Polis, Epoque and the Czech and Polish databases. EUROVOC, the thesaurus originally created by the European Parliament and now under the umbrella of the Office of European Publications, was chosen as a basis for this language switch-board. EUROVOC is ideal for this method as it exists in all the languages of the member countries.
The mapping between the national parliaments thesauri and EUROVOC has by no means been straightforward. The EUROVOC thesaurus is a high-level thesaurus and just as the national parliamentary databases reflect the legal tradition procedures, the Anglo-Saxon and the Continental, so do the thesauri associated with them. There is certainly no question of a ”one-to-one” match in the majority of the terms.
The database of the switch board at the moment consists of 21.000 terms. A special software has been written for the different thesauri and the software will be standardised to be compatible with all the languages of the member countries of the European Union. The ISO standard has been followed but slightly adjusted as it did not fulfil the need of truly multilingual thesauri according to our linguistic experts in the project.
Another important way of access in ELVIL is the Web-index. The www-index is a quality controlled index on European law and politics, consisting of around 1.500 records with an URL linked to the actual source. The records in the index-database is constructed according to the metadata standard Dublin Core, and the EUROVOC thesaurus is used for subject access here as in the rest of the ELVIL system.
An extended search among documents on European law and politics can be executed through the Harvester set up in ELVIL. The search robot is pointed at the homepages of the main organisations in Europe and three links down. The Web-index is thus a searchable database, we have however seen the benefit of constructing two subsets of the index:
To help users access the information and formulate questions the ELVIL 2000 project has developed a Virtual Librarian. An important strand within this work is to use techniques of artificial intelligence (such as intelligent agents and fuzzy logic) to improve the interaction between users and these information sources
It was felt that this would be particularly useful because:
The Virtual Librarian uses user modelling - to gather information about each individual user's requirements and experience; a problem-solving methodology called fuzzy logic - to infer what type of information a user is looking for; and a "database advisor" rulebase - which can recommend the most appropriate sources of information to the user.
Knowledge on selection of databases and search strategies was gathered from the relevant experts in the ELVIL2000 team. A first prototype was produced using Xpert Rule (a knowledge-base development tool). Xpert Rule supported rapid development, which meant that feedback could be obtained from project partners and various design issues could beaddressed at an early stage.
The first prototype was then re-engineered, this time in Java, so that it could be integrated with the main ELVIL Web site.
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| Figure 1: The Virtual Librarian registration form |
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| Figure 2: Virtual Librarian - Search form |
The user types in terms he is looking for and the Virtual Librarian recommends the best information sources for this special user:
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| Figure 3: Virtual Librarian´s recommendations |
The user can, if s/he wishes see how his ”learning curve” proceeds as the system records the user´s previous usage of relevant ELVIL databases.
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| Figure 4: The learning curve |
The Virtual Librarian´s combination of user modelling and fuzzy logic to help users formulate queries is a novel approach to this aspect of information retrieval and we believe an extremely interesting development.
A fundamental idea in ELVIL is that one should not just be able to search for information but also be guided in the understanding of the democratic political procedures in Europe. To that effect we have implemented the ELVIL Encyclopedia. The articles in the Encyclopedia are written by lecturers from different universities.
In the Encyclopaedia ELVIL 2000 offers lectures on European law and politics and a Case-bank with cases on issues in the political life that have engaged people over the last few years.
The articles provide a general or abstract view of different aspects of the political system based on a set of concepts (the eight subjects) that are common for all polities, thus allowing for comparison. The cases will serve as empirical exemplifications of some of the concepts described in the articles. The cases are based on real life events and their documentation in public documents (taken from the parliamentary databases, when possible). They are designed to give the user a first-hand view on the political processes, in contrast to the more abstract view presented in the articles. Both articles and cases make use of several media formats (texts, images, animations etc.) to illustrate and explain legal and political processes.
Another pedagogical idea has been that users are more willing to learn if they can decide how and what to learn, which means that the users will get the possibility to construct their own picture of the political system. Here the idea was to build a highly interactive structure and to maintain a high degree of "granularity" in the learning modules. That means that the knowledge ought to be as subdivided as possible, in order for us to be able to present it in as many ways as possible to satisfy as many user needs as possible; and from the user’s point of view, it should be possible to follow each learning module (e.g. an article) independently of the other modules in the encyclopaedia.
At the moment there are detailed articles on the political and legal structure of Sweden, Spain, Catalan (as an examle of a region) Poland, the Czech Republic and the EU and.shorter articles on other countries in Europe.
The contents of articles are structured in the same way in all polities. That is: 1. History and Identity, 2. Main Constitutional Principles and Citizenship, 3. Civil society and systems of representation, 4. Key political and legal institutions, 5. Processes of Legislation, 6. Processes of Governance, 7. Processes of Adjudication, and 8. Public documentation.
The case method refers to the use of cases as educational vehicles to give learners an opportunity to put themselves in the decision maker's or problem solvers position. Through repeated personal analysis, definition of problem, identification of alternatives, statement of objectives and decision criteria, choice of action and plan for implementation, the learner gains an opportunity to develop analytical and planning skills in a laboratory setting. The virtual cases in ELVIL are based on these ideas.
The aim with using the case-method in ELVIL is to exemplify concepts in the articles, explain the political and legislative processes in general as well as to give the user an understanding about how legal and political documents in the databases are connected to (and can be interpreted in the light of) political life.
There are presently some twenty cases in the casebank covering real events and questions in political life that have engaged people over the last few years.
The third bearing idea in ELVIL is - Communication. ELVIL 2000 has implemented a platform for communication and collaboration. The idea is to try out a way of organizing forums that is both effective and participative; well prepared and successfully realized; centered on problem-solving and not only on analysis; with means that allow for preparation and long-distance participation.
The following table shows some examples of discussion forums within ELVIL and their classification within the ELVIL matrix:
| Promotion of innovative experiences | Design of new Rules | Presentation of new concepts | Alternative models of social organization | Collection of opinions | |
| International Politics | The European policy for innovation | An alternative model for the Maastricht Treaty | The United States of Europe | Europass: the plan to fight corruption | The neo extremisms |
| National Politics | Infoville: the application of telematics in Villena | Non-violent solutions for the Basque country | Representative & direct democracy | Representative & direct democracy | The Austrian liberal party |
| Conflicts resolution | Reconciliation model at Rwanda | Introducing mediation at
educational centres Defence 2001: exclusively defensive armies |
Digital referees | Solidarity with Chiapas to set the limits to the Neoliberalism | Custody of children after divorce |
| Social systems | Napster and the peer-to-peer solutions | Law legislation of homosexual partnerships | A sustainable ecological society | Welfare state | The aging of Europe and the immigration |
| Civil society | Solidary consumption networks and fair commerce | Public financing for civil organizations | Working groups of volunteers | Civil organization to control the
public expenditure Civil society control over the public TV |
Do you believe in NGOs? |
| Globalisation | Telework in foreign countries sitting at home | New laws for digital global
marketplaces Atom energy – prohibiton or legalisation for its future exploitation |
Global climate changes and their political consequences | Global minds and models | “Pro and con” of the economic globalisation |
The range of topics and objectives will be reviewed and modified according to the results of the demonstration phase in the project.
The project also selected and configured three independent Web-based platforms as the technical underlying infrastructure for the e-democracy platform. Among the all the criteria considered for their selection, it is worthy to mention the following two: their capacity for cooperative work and their capacity for creating debates. The selected platforms should guarantee at least one of the two.
The capacity for cooperative work provides users with the ability to create joint reports and share documentation. A concrete example would be the creation of cases or lectures by a group of experts. On the other hand, the capacity of creating debates provides users with the ability to create spaces where they can discuss and interchange ideas. The combination of both capacities provides users the ability to discuss and share or create documentation at the same time (eg: as a result of the discussion).
During the demonstration phase over 80 % of the users said they would probably or definitely access ELVIL services again. The encyclopaedia received the highest rating but all services received a rating above average. Looking at Web statistics we can see that last year there were around 70.000 visits to the ELVIL 2000 site. Looking at country statistics for September one can see that ELVIL 2000 is used globally. Mostly in Europé and The US but also in for instance South Africa, Korea, Japan, Bolivia, Malaysia, The Russian Federation…
ELVIL 2000 will be exploited as ELVIL nexus. It should be noted however that parallel exploitation at the individual project-sites of the ELVIL 2000 project is taking place as well.
The chief objective of nexus is to work towards an increased openness and accessibility of the European public sphere by promoting the idea of the nexus civic network (ncn). This will be achieved by licensing the nexus publishing tools as well as by running a central Web site, which will act as the central node of the network. By signing on to a nexus partner-program, organisations agree on enhancing their existing Web sites with the nexus publishing tools. The resulting nexus civic network can be conceived as a decentralised information- and knowledge-producing network institutionally based in the European civil society.
The core idea of nexus is that every piece of information or knowledge that is published with the nexus tools will be searchable and retrievable through any other nexus-enhanced site. Nexus would ideally expand in a Web-like manner as organisations enhance and integrate their Web sites with the nexus tools. The existing structures of non-profit knowledge- and information-production in Europe could thus be made more efficient. In other words, it would be possible to reap the benefits of an increased division of labour in the European public sphere. At the same time, the information and knowledge would be made more accessible to the general citizen.
Nexus will primarily be targeted to producers of non-licensed knowledge and information products, public information and so called "grey" literature in the European public sphere - in the following Information- and knowledge producing organisations (hereafter IKO's). The tools are designed to add value to already existing publishing activities in such organisations. Targeted organisations include the higher education and cultural sector, the civil society sector as well as the administrative sector. Crucial criteria for partner selection will be an academic ethos on information- and knowledge-management, dedication to the principles of rule of law, democratic process and constitutionalism and an explicit aim of producing information for the civic community on a national or European level.
Our aim is to successfully launch the nexus service into the European non-profit information market with appropriate public funding.
Nexus' general mission will be to work towards an increased openness and accessibility of the European public sphere by adding value - by promulgating the nexus tools - to already existing structures of knowledge- and information-production. The overriding strategy will be to provide non-profit software solutions targeted to civil society organisations that in their turn aim at adding value to available public information or alternatively aim at publishing educational material.
The purpose of nexus is:
The European Commission has identified the public sector as an information-producing sector of rank that could benefit the civic community if the information was made more widely available. However, all public spheres suffers from a crucial inhibiting fact. It is costly to produce high-quality civic information while users are reluctant to pay a high price for that kind of information. The combination of cost-intensive supply, and cost-sensitive demand can be called "the content-gap" of civic information. In the European public sphere, the "content-gap" is further reinforced by the prevailing linguistic plurality. These limitations inhibits the full potential of the European cultural economy as provider of civic information. While it is difficult to overcome the content-gap on a commercial basis, it is crucial to do so in order for a democratic public sphere to work.
The historical problem of providing civic information to a low cost, and thus overcome the "content-gap", has mainly been addressed by non-profit civil society organisations on a national level. Non-profit civil society organisations has based their knowledge production on alternate sources of funding, either as interest-organisations, party-organisations, or NGO's, and publishes in the form of publicly available journals, papers or reports.
The Internet has changed many of the underlying economic conditions of the cultural economy - mainly by decreasing the cost for distribution. However, the cost for production remains high and labour-intensive. This is the springing point for the Internet economy. While "content is king," - content costs. This is the main reason for the relatively slow progress of the Internet economy in the area of civic information.
Main Aim
The underlying logic is to "harvest" IKO's for papers, reports or databases that otherwise, because of the "content-gap" never would have made it to the commercial market - and thus would never have been published. The main goal of nexus will be to provide non-profit solutions to reduce the "content-gap", targeted for organisations in the civil society that wants to add value to public information or produce new knowledge that they wish to make public. The initial target institutions will be parliaments, libraries, universities and other public knowledge-producing institutions. The goal is to create a set of interconnected information nodes - something we choose to call a partner-nexus - in the European public sphere, maintained by civil society organisations, where information concerning European law and politics can be made available for free for the general public.
The ELVIL project has created a set of easy-to-use standardised publishing tools, built on open standards (Z39.50, XML and HTML), designed for low-cost and low-maintenance management. They should ideally be inserted in existing knowledge-production and publication lines, with the least possible effort on behalf of the knowledge-producing institutions. The resulting "partner-nexus" will automatically be connected to all other nodes, and all other sister-nodes will be searchable from one and the same node. One of the nodes will be the central nexus Web site witch will host a central server and an editorial office. The cost for maintaining the civic information and knowledge network will thus be distributed among the participating institutions.
The nexus tools have been constructed around the Z39.50 protocol and are fully integrated with the HTML-standard. Through the partner-program, existing IKO's in the European civil society can enhance their existing Web site with the nexus tools. The nexus tools include easy-to-use tools for publishing of databases (the Database gateways), tools for multi-lingual search and retrieve (the Language switch-board), tools for building specialised Web-indexes (the Web-index), tools for building specialised e-learning material (the Learning centre), and tools for building "virtual organisations" (the Electronic democracy platform -EDP). Since the nexus tools are built on open and compatible standards (primarily HTML and Z39.50), every new nexus-enhanced Web site will be compatible and shareable with any other nexus-site. The language switchboard ensures that all resources are searchable and indexable in all official European languages. When an organisation has enhanced its Web site with the nexus tools, it becomes an access-node for shared public information in the nexus network of civic information - as all nexus-enhanced Web sites are capable of sharing information with each other.
The central nexus Web site will provide a central access node for all the information made available by utilising the nexus tools and to make sure that the nexus tools work like an independent and relevant source of civic information for the general public in Europe. It will continue to run the gateways and indexes of the initial ELVIL-project and as new nexus-enhanced Web sites are made available online, those sources will be included. The central Web site will also feature an edited section, focused primarily on long-term themes in the European news-flow. The central editor will comment on current themes and supply relevant available in the nexus civic network - educational resources, documentary material as well as collections of relevant Web-links. Such resources would be collected and presented in special sections that over time would grow to become important background material for more intense analysis than what is permitted through the regular news-flow. The central nexus Web site would preferably become a natural second-stop for consumers of news, both individuals as well as organisations, that want to go beyond the immediate news to seek more perspectives and more background information.
Appealing Elements of ELVIL nexus:
It is envisaged that the central nexus Web site, with the existing content, can commence as soon as appropriate funding has been secured [2].
or Ingrid Cantwell, Stockholm University Library: ingrid.cantwell@sub.su.se
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Ingrid Cantwell
Stockholm University Library
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For citation purposes:
Cantwell, I. "ELVIL 2000: The European Legislative Virtual Library ", Cultivate Interactive, issue
5, 1 October 2001
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue5/elvil/>
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