About the Legal Thesaurus

Tags: Legal Thesaurus

The Legal Thesaurus is a monolingual (but with some multilingual capabilities) and controlled indexing and legal research tool including all fields of law. The Legal Thesaurus includes new fields of law which, until when the project started, were treated either marginally or not at all, and should prove useful in helping legal research and indexing more efficient.

The various functional features of the Thesaurus are mainly geared to the needs of the two major target groups: researchers – both experts and interested members of the public – as well as librarians and information specialists indexing legal literature and documents. The Legal Thesaurus is not only an invaluable aid for database users but it has many potential uses by individuals and organizations indexing their own information resources for both internal use and on the Internet.

Its strengths include:

• Broad coverage of law subjects
• Approximately 50,000 concepts
• Specific terminology for all subjects covered
• Top, broad, narrow and related concepts to help users find relevant terminology
• Cross-references to legal dictionaries, encyclopedias and law books
• Multi-lingual capabilities, with German, Italian, Portuguese, French and Spanish equivalents
• American and British spelling variants
• Controlled vocabulary in constant use

The Legal Thesaurus Project

With its many microthesauri (major subject areas), the Legal Thesaurus goes beyond the law field, and also covers law firms practice and other major areas. This widened scope has implications for the size of the Thesaurus: the current version includes more than 45.000 English concepts.

With such a broad range of fields to cover, the Thesaurus Editorial Team faces the long-term and permanent challenge of balancing the need to make the contents as exhaustive as necessary while at the same time ensuring that the Thesaurus keeps to a manageable size.

A Collaborative Effort: Comments and Suggestions to the Legal Thesaurus Editorial Team

The experience gained in everyday use of the Legal Thesaurus is central to the ongoing work of updating and improvement. The Legal Thesaurus Editorial Team therefore also relies on the constructive co-operation of the Legal Thesaurus users, who are expressly invited to become actively involved in the development process.

More about Legal thesaurus

Mission of Legal Thesaurus, Legal Index and Legal Metadata

To promote the exchange, integration and use of legal data and legal vocabularies through enhanced data publishing, discovery, documentation and accessibility.

Legal professionals, the academia and the general reader face an opportunity and a challenge in the volume of data available from various legal systems. The Lawi Project, including the encyclopedia of law, can help make it easier for you to find, access, and use other data sets. If you create legal data sets, Lawi can help make your data easier to advertise, distribute, reuse, and combine with other data sets. Our goal is to promote collaborative legal research in the study and practice of Law, by simplifying the incredibly complex world of metadata into specific, straightforward guidance. Lawi maintains this website to foster communication and collaboration with thousands of legal practitiones and law school professors.

Lawi is a community-supported, collaborative effort. If you are not already registered, please consider joining us and contributing to the Legal Thesaurus, the Legal Index or the Legal Metadata sites. This is an exciting time to be working on interoperable data systems, and with your participation Lawi is moving community practices forward in standards, tools, and best practices.

For Developers

This web site provides information related to service profiles and implementation in development for the Legal Thesaurus. It is meant to be a site where developers can learn about the standard in use, the objectives of the application profiles being developed, tools and details about particular implementations. You are invited to browse and register if you wish to post material or participate in discussions.

Please, use the Posting Candidate Concepts form for alteration suggestions.

Everything You Need to Know About Thesaurus for Law in One Place

This free online information resource is all about the legal taxonomy: Content and links to everything you may need to know about a legal thesaurus in one convenient website. Explore our collection of MicroThesauri; browse  our ThesaurusArrays,  visit sites and blogs and events about thesaurus and law and discover related papers and books.