Legalurn: A framework for organizing and surfing legal documents on the Web

Identifying resources is a critical issue in the wide web information space. Several identification systems have been defined, each tailored to a specific domain or application field, and characterized by many limitations. In this paper we describe an identification system compliant to URN specification that has been defined and implemented specifically for the legal domain, while providing several innovative features. The system allows to easily manage references to juridical documents and to automate the distributed hyperlinking building process. Moreover, the system provides a resolution service associating to the logical identifier a physical resource (e.g. URL) and other facilities to ensure semantic coherence and unambiguousness in the uniform names attribution task. Finally, we briefly outline future work concerning the opportunity to investigate other relevant properties in the legal domain by representing laws as a directed graph.