Jusletter IT

The LISE project (http://ztwweb.trans.univie.ac.at/lise/) aims to facilitate the consolidation of administrative nomenclatures and legal terminologies. It develops tools and best practices to enhance interoperability and cross border collaboration.

Organisational terminology is of essential importance for the operational value of the owner of such resources, be it governmental, institutional or commercial. The main purpose of the LISE project is to help terminology managers in public institutions as well as private service providers and companies improve the quality of their terminological resources in legal and administrative domains.

LISE has three concrete goals: 1) Identification of current problems around legal and administrative terminology workflows, 2) Implementation of a web-based terminology service platform for collaborative inter-institutional work, and 3) Active involvement of user groups to guarantee success.

LISE addresses the urgent need for consolidated terminologies and administrative nomenclatures as tools to enhance interoperability and cross border collaboration. It enables the efficient cleaning of large terminological resources in a collaborative online environment. Unlike fragmented or silo solutions LISE enables a unified cross-border communication flow.

Without high-quality and standards-based terminologies, it is impossible to reach precision, efficiency, and transparency within and across any services, processes or systems in legal and administrative work. To create more complete, higher quality resources it is required to add languages to existing terminological resources and/or merge them. This is a daunting task in terms of time and staff efforts. Now, tools allowing the semi-automatic processing of data when adding languages, cleaning terminological resources from doublettes or harmonising them will facilitate this task. While the scientific basis of the project delivers a deep insight into workflow best practices, the tangible result of LISE are specific tools to assist the terminology workflow as well as a platform to discuss and exchange data.

1. Efficient spotting of inconsistencies and gaps: LISE allows the automated identification of doublettes, inconsistent meta data, or similar terminological entries that wait to be unified.
2. Collaboration with peers from other institutions: In the LISE Collaboration Portal all stakeholders, from different organisations, can communicate about their terminological resources, inspect the results created by the LISE tools, discuss reviews and drive new activities.
3. Benefitting from proven best practices: Users understand at what point in time each specific tool or method might be usefully applied.

 

1 – Data Status: Before

Redundant data: We see doublettes (for instance records illustrated by the same A in the graphic)

Inconsistent data: A’s are not together, not all B’s are together etc.

Incomplete data: We see gaps (information for the concepts illustrated by A and B is deeper than for G or F)

2 – Spot the Flaws

LISE Tools automate the spotting of such flaws, namely doublettes, inconsistencies, gaps. Potential mistakes in the large data set are identified and listed.

3 – Review of the Results with Peers

In the LISE Collaboration Portal the identified problems are presented, discussed and decisions are driven. Records belonging together are potentially merged, missing data is added, and inconsistencies are cleared. A joined approval can be reached.

4 – Data Status: After

The resource is now clean, consistent, and enhanced.

 

The web based service will facilitate the following:

• accessibility to high quality terminology resources in many domains and languages
• dissemination of best practices of how to improve and use one’s own terminology repositories
• handling of the diversity of coding schemes and data organization
• improve cross-lingual and cross-domain interoperability (syntactic, semantic, pragmatic) across existing technical applications
• handling of cultural differences across language communities and domain cultures (administrative and legal language is the best example)

After an initial step to register an organisation to become a new member of the LISE platform (phase 1), a then concrete harmonisation activity (phase 2) is triggered by the organisation, i.e. the data owners. Terminological working principles differentiate between different types of prescriptive terminology management called harmonisation and standardisation, depending on the legal status of the resources concerned and of the data owners.

Figure 1 LISE Workflow

ESTeam will then analyse and assess the effort before processing the data with its proven tools (phases 3 and 4). Phase 5 will then involve all contributors to collaboratively review and agree on identified data changes. This will be done via the online collaboration portal of the LISE Web Service.

The LISE Web Service this way implements the overall platform to deliver and provide access to data resources, but particularly enhances it with a collaboration module to communicate about the resources.

Harmonisation and interoperability activities require the involvement of stakeholders from many different institutions and organisations. All come from different backgrounds with different knowledge. An online collaboration portal must take this into account, while a common ground of knowledge or user training cannot be assumed. The portal must be as user friendly as successful online consumer applications like Wikipedia, Facebook or Google+.

Traditional collaboration tools like forums, wikis and mailing lists lack the flexibility and straightforwardness that is important to collaborate efficiently. While forums and mailing lists force a very strict hierarchy and tend to conceal the wider context of a posting, a wiki quickly loses its structure; it needs a lot of planning and communication (often on alternative channels).

Resource Providing: Web interfaces to FTP servers for the exchange of documents, have similar disadvantages: The documents have to be kept in a file system structure, what makes them lose the original connection to the related information. Different versions of the same document are often hard to identify, what makes accessing them a cumbersome experience. They all need a great amount of administration and maintenance and continuous monitoring.

Google+ et al have introduced less strict but successful approach: All communication is based on simple postings to an overall project stream. No new and unaccustomed concepts, tools, or naming conventions have to be learned. This guarantees a very fast learning curve. Every post consists of a text message, an optional title, attachments like images or files, and links to internal or external sources. The visibility of individual posts is defined by context-specific and user-defined rules. Users can browse this stream by filtering and searching, and by subscribing to certain topics.

The idea behind the portal is to make it a similar experience to such modern social media platforms.

When logged in the user sees all accessible posts listed in a single stream sorted by currentness. This way recent activities are scanned at first glance. In a side column we see the work groups and subscriptions of the current user. Selecting any of these items will filter the stream to display only related posts. This makes navigating the different streams and focusing on a specific topic a very straightforward task.

The user can personalize her profile to best fit her needs and interests by subscribing to topics, tags, or activities of other users. Relevant information can be found very quickly and efficiently. It is also possible to receive email notifications on new posts or comments affecting a subscription, what helps to keep up to date with the project and to integrate the communication into the existing workflow.

Managers create work groups and invite users to join them. A work group can also be used to restrict access to certain posts. This way information related to a sub-project or specific task will be kept in a single space and will be only available to relevant persons. As a side-effect a work group stream will serve as a documentation of the progress of a specific task.

Users can create posts or comments on other posts at any time. When creating a post the author can decide who should be able to see it: it can be public, only visible to members of one or more work groups, or only to single users. The author of the post defines the context by adding the post to a predefined topic or by providing some tags.

The fact that all related files and documents are simply attached to a post makes them directly accessible in the context of the relevant information. Several versions of the same document can be kept together and can easily be identified by date and context.

The LISE Collaboration Portal sees the following major functionalities:

Home Page:
•    Top level, public announcements
•    Sign-In fields
•    About, Contact, and Register pages

After Having Signed In:
•    Fully equipped collaboration and discussion functionality
•    «My Stream»: to navigate to individual or group discussions
•    «Bookmarks» to re-navigate quickly to very interesting topics
•    «Areas» to cluster topics
•    Creation of new topics
•    Voting on Yes/No-type topics
•    Attachments of files to topics
•    Replying and commenting via new posts to an existing topic
•    Discussion amongst individuals or within groups

The LISE Web Service is a modern rich web application while, on the technical side, nicely avoiding any browser plug-in, like Java or Microsoft Silverlight.

Figure 2 LISE Web Platform Architecture

A client browser (1) establishes a secure https connection to a REST based (2) web service. Through a performance optimisation layer (3) it interacts with the Ruby on Rails based collaboration portal (4), which is a major module of the LISE Web Infrastructure (5). User accounts are stored via OpenLDAP (6) technology and data is stored in a MongoDB database. The technology selection was driven, inter alia, by the priority to be non-proprietary, scalable, and standards compliant.

The LISE Web Infrastructure had been delivered in July 2011. With LISE project milestone M12 (31 January 2012) ESTeam had delivered the major functionality of the collaboration portal. Thus, phases 1) and 5) of the LISE workflow (see Figure 1 LISE Workflow) are covered.

Throughout 2012, and up to the final project milestone M30 in July 2013, the LISE collaboration portal will be carefully fine-tuned based on the feedback from the user groups.

The LISE collaboration portal is unique in the market. Its approach to abandon a strictly hierarchical communication structure while gaining the freedom to present the data in its natural context has never been seen before for terminology workflow modelling systems. The communication streams serve as a self-documenting history that can be browsed from different angles of view and with different scopes. This highly reduces the requirements on administration, e.g. to keep up some predefined structure, while giving the users the ability to decide in a very granular way which information to share with whom and in what context. Combining subscriptions with a flexible notification system will help to integrate the platform seamlessly into the daily workflows.

These benefits encourage a longer term application and repurposing of the collaboration portal onto other domains outside of legal and administrative terminologies.

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Senior Product Manager, ESTeam Germany GmbH, Rungestrasse 20, 10179 Berlin, Germany
michael@esteam.se; www.esteam.se

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