Better access to law by codification and consolidation of legal acts

The purpose of this paper is to present the work undertaken from Greek Government for improving the access to law and creating consolidated legal texts easy to reuse. This work was conducted, during a European project that was funded by the ISA2 Programme, in collaboration with other Greek, Italian and European organisations. One of the main problems of the Greek legislation is its complexity and the dispersion of regulations. The Greek legal system lacks of internal cohesion due to the incessant amendment of existing laws and introduction of new ones. Access to solid, consolidated legislation is difficult, especially for non-legal professionals; discovery of the valid legal framework during a past period is even worse. This work intends to demonstrate how the legacy of the codification and consolidation methodology and practice developed by the "Department of Administrative Codification-Raptarchis" can be re-evaluated via the implementation of contemporary ICT tools and methods, in order to create and update consolidated legal texts. The suggested solution includes the use of legal and ICT tools for the semantic analysis of legal texts, the extension of ELI ontology using Akoma Ntoso and ISA CPOV concepts and the development of a relative proof of concept software. The application of the above solution results in: i) provision of content in both human and machine readable format, ii) visualization and accessing to Law over time iii) linking of Greek legislation with European and other Member States legislation, iv) use of a thematic legal index that can be used to improve the capabilities of law search in different languages.