Jusletter IT

Editorial

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In this February issue of Jusletter IT, a forum is traditionally offered for the - now already 16th - International Legal Informatics Symposion IRIS 2013  The electronic dissemination of scientific and practical results should be supported in the international legal informatics community with a particular focus to those in German speaking countries. The printed proceedings will be published with books@ocg.at, the publishing branch of the OCG. Editors of this Jusletters IT are the main editors and Walter Hötzendorfer who kindly acts for this Jusletter IT as a guest editor.
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This edition covers besides the moto «abstraction and application» the following themes:
  • Theory of legal informatics          
  • Legal information & search technologies
  • Legal informatics systems & applications
  • Knowlege-based process management in administrative networks          
  • E-Government
  • Open Government          
  • E-Democracy     
  • E-Law-making
  • E-Procurement   
  • Legal theory       
  • Law and language
  • Legal visualisation/multisensory law         
  • IT law
  • Data protection
  • E-Commerce      
  • Copyright law  
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On the general topic «abstraction and application»:  

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By abstraction, the view should be focused on the essentials. In law, concrete elements and its characteristics is given a structure, particularly by means of concepts. This generalization and its formalisation constitutes the basis for the multi-layered representation of the law (text, commentary, legal ontologies, logical structures, visualisations, etc.). In computer science, abstraction is a main basis of modeling and thus the development of software. In both disciplines, and hence also in legal informatics, abstraction is the primary way to reduce complexity. 

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The application is a software to solve user problems. It is the practice to theory and abstraction. The app is an application for smartphones and tablet computers. While the abstraction has a very long tradition, the application and the app are a recent development. Complex processes should be supported by means of a user-friendly smartphone application, which in turn requires an abstraction (and simplification). In law, the app opens a challenge for processing complex queries and documents in a simple and user-friendly form. 

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The variety of other topics is best captured by reading  the leads or the contributions. Data protrection, legal information and search technologies, E-Government, E-Democracy and legal visualisation/multisensory law are the focus of this issue, as usual supplemented by a wide range of IT law contributions. Open Government and Open Data demonstrate the importance of legal informatics as a pioneer for a transparent and participatory society. The contributions to law and language point to the growing importance of text-based legal linguistics. 

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Having said this, we hope you enjoy reading this issue! 

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Franz Kummer, Erich Schweighofer and as guest editor Walter Hötzendorfer