Legal citation referencing using SGML and HyTime

Abstract

The availability of hypertext links in legal documents is a very momentous topic. It has come up by the success of the World Wide Web on the one hand side and by the increasing use of databases in order to professionally store original and consolidated legal materials on the other side. And though, despite the importance, the number of available tools to create and maintain such links is not very extensive. Whereas the recognition of legal citation patterns with regular expressions and parsers is one side of the coin, the corresponding question, how to apply those results and how to maintain such references in a lively environment of legal materials, which tends to evolve and emerge from day to day, is the other. This paper aims to show up one solution for this problem by using the standardized markup languages SGML and HyTime in combination with the SGML- and hypertext-programming language OmniMark. Despite the necessary initial effort to bring up an industrial strength production environment and despise the comprehensiveness of these standards they can be applied with great advantage to solve the given problem efficiently also in terms of reduced production time and manual conversion costs. The appliance of these standardized formats may also help to obtain interconnected legal databases, which may contribute not only to meet fundamental and ancient principles of law (publicity, unity, unequivocal administration of law, transparency) but may also allow the reflection of some well settled ideas of legal theory and legal reasoning under new circumstances.