BOLD Vision 2020:Designing a vision for the future of Big Open Legal Data

The vision of openlaws.eu is to make access to justice easier for citizens, business- es and legal experts. For this purpose, an innovative legal information platform has been designed by the openlaws.eu project, considering the needs of various stakeholder groups as well as the latest developments in technology and our information society. Access to justice is a fundamental problem in the European Union. There are over 500 million citizens and over 21 million businesses who live, work and operate in 28 jurisdictions, written in 24 official languages. A common market cannot work without a legal system as a basis. Legal information is a public good and it is the duty of governments and the EU to inform citizens and business about the law. In a democracy and under the rule of law everybody should know legislation and case law – or at least have access to it. Legal tech is a new terms for new technology that can be applied to legal information in order to create better access and better understanding of the law. However, just because things can be done, does not mean automatically that they are done. Financial and organisational restrictions and the lack of competency can be a deal-breaker for innovation. Open data, open innovation and open source software can be a potential solution to this problem, especially when combined to one coherent ecosystem. openlaws.eu has developed a prototype platform upon these new open concepts. The application and implementation of some of the features of this innovative legal cloud service indicate where the road of “Big Open Legal Data” can lead us in the upcoming years. The project team envisages an environment, where a “social layer” is put on top of the existing “institutional layer”. Citizens, businesses and legal experts can actively collaborate on the basis of primary legislation and case law. Linked and aggregated legal data provide a solid basis. Such information can then be represented in traditional and more innovative ways. Text and data mining as well as legal intelligence help to process large amounts of legal information automatically, so that experts can focus on the more complicated questions. In the next five years more and more legal data will be opened up, not only because of the PSI Directive, but also because it is in the best interest of governments. As a result, we anticipate that more legal tech start-ups will emerge, as already happened during the past two years. They will apply innovative concepts and new technology on existing legal information and create better access to justice in the EU, in Member States and in the world

Lynx: A knowledge-based AI service platform for content processing, enrichment and analysis for the legal domain

The EU-funded project Lynx focuses on the creation of a knowledge graph for the legal domain (Legal Knowledge Graph, LKG) and its use for the semantic processing, analysis and enrichment of documents from the legal domain. This article describes the use cases covered in the project, the entire developed platform and the semantic analysis services that operate on the documents. © 202

Psychodrama, Playback Theatre & Lifelong Learning in Action research

The volume presents the results of a European Grundtvig project, which involved numerous national and international associations in the pursuit of the common objectives to help unemployed people [ARPsIC (Romania), Kasvunpaikka Oy e Soumen Tarinateatteriverkkoyhdistys (Finland), OAGG/PD (Austria), Save Pazinimo Ir Realizavimo Studija (Lithuania), AIPSIM e Humus (Italy)], within the LLP, the European Grundtvig Program (EGP) focuses on problems related to adults and the ageing population, specifically on education and “alternative education streams”. The Grundtvig program provides adults with opportunities to improve their knowledge and skills, keeping them mentally agile and potentially more employable, also supporting the institutions and organizations delivering these services, in addition to teachers and staff. The main objective of this project was to teach the TG active techniques of psychodrama and playback theatre. These techniques are effective in increasing the FB’s creativity and relationship skills enhancing their coping strategies before an ever changing world in the midst of an economic crisis. Taking on the perspective of “research-action”, the SPD project also intended to monitor the potential changes that the use of this training approach produced in the TG. The TG thus served a double function: on the one hand, the TG were pupils learning to change their own behaviour thanks to the use of active techniques, and on the other hand, the TG were educators /teachers learning to use active techniques that they will later employ with those who suffer social failure. This required that participants mobilize their own feelings of failure, in order to identify with those with whom they work. This approach permitted us to investigate at the end of the training what was the perceived effectiveness of the use of the active techniques. The make-up of the TG in the pre-test, in the post-test and in the “common/shared” pre-test/post-test is described in Table 1 (see table1 )and highlights the female prevalence of the participants

Ratings of usability of didactic models: a comparative case study in Croatia and Germany

The study refers to the unfavourable reputation and status of general didactics as well as its decreasing importance in teacher education. This is a result of poor performance achieved in international tests by students. They score low on knowledge and arguments, and empirical studies indicate that didactic models are useless. In view of the above problem, the aim of this article is to examine the validity of the argument that didactic models are useless. It is necessary to examine if general didactics are being in an unfavourable position along with its possible successors in the international context. In order to achieve that, we conducted an empirical study into the usability of didactic models for lesson planning in Croatia and compared it with the results obtained in previous research in Germany. The term usability means the advantages of theory in practice. On the basis of the results of the empirical study, we concluded that didactic models are not generally unusable. Additionally, they are different according to their usability. These results open a path for further research on this topic in the international context