Jusletter IT

The general theme of the 17th International Legal Informatics Symposium IRIS is «transparency» or the tension between transparency in the political and legal sense; and transparency in the meaning of invisibility of hardware and software components (computer science).

Transparency is one of the key objectives of legal informatics with the purpose of improving the legal system. Access to the law has been significantly improved through extensive use of legal information systems. Legal documents are accessible for everyone on the Internet.

Citizen information systems have greatly improved the support of the citizen. But the trend continues. For a long time the aim has been an IT-oriented transformation of legal norms and facts in order to support legal decisions by means of a formalization of the law. In e-government, transparency means Open Data and Open Government. Transparency is also important for the examination of the proportionality of the processing of personal data that has increased strongly. Participation and accountability are impossible without transparency. It is important that the principles of Internet governance continue to support transparency.

The concept of editing and publishing the conference proceedings already before the meeting has been proven to be useful in the past four years. Thus, the selection of visiting presentations is easier; papers can be read in addition to the presentations and parallel sessions checked easily. The guiding principle still applies: «The indispensable scientific and practical benefits of legal informatics should be introduced to a wide audience in a comprehensive and comprehensible form.» As usual, the conference proceedings contain in addition to new scientific findings also contributions to the practical problems and applications of legal informatics.

It is divided into the following thematic groups:
• Jubilee and Commemoration
• Notes on the General Topic: Transparency
• Theory of Legal Informatics
• Legal Information & Search Technologies
• Juridical Informatics Systems and Applications
• Knowledge-based Process Management in Administration Networks
• Big Data & Open Data
• E-Government & Open Government
• E-Justice
• E-Democracy
• Electronic Law-making
• E -Procurement
• Legal Theory
• Legal Visualization / Multisensory Law
• Theory of IT Law (legal dogmatics)
• Data Protection & Privacy
• SMART / RESPECT Workshop on surveillance
• Telecommunications Law
• E-Commerce
• IP Law
• Science Fiction and Utopias

We hope that these proceedings, in printed and electronic form, will find as much interest as those of previous years!

Vienna and Bern, February 2014

Erich Schweighofer, Franz Kummer and Walter Hötzendorfer