ISYS Powering NSW LawAccess

For those who have ever wondered how a Power of Attorney works, how to recover a debt, the penalties for drink driving or parental obligations for the financial support of children, the New South Wales Attorney General's Department has launched a site that can link you to information from across more than a hundred reliable legal web sites.

A unique collaborative venture involving government, private and community legal services, LawAccess NSW was launched by the NSW Attorney General, The Honorable Bob Debus, MP, on June 17th 2002.

"Its uniqueness" according to the Attorney, "…stems not only from the merging of the resources and commitment of industry, government and community organizations, but from the range of services now available to the community at the end of the telephone and on the web."

LawAccess Online is part of the NSW Attorney General's Department's LawAccess NSW initiative, designed to provide improved and more convenient access to legal information and services for the general public via a central contact center telephone service and on the Internet.

Underpinning the web service is a newly developed AGLS metadata schema for the justice sector - the Justice Sector Metadata Standard (JSMS).

As a profession that principally trades in information, the legal sector has made a significant investment over the last few years in online services.

Through initiatives developed by the NSW Attorney General's Department, legal professionals can access the ISYS:web powered CaseLaw NSW service to obtain court decisions as soon as they are handed down and, in the Land and Environment Court, can even have some decisions made online. The Department is progressing a range of new development across NSW courts to enhance access and efficiency in the administration of justice.

Allied to these advances in online service delivery, court users can download court forms, obtain plain language guides and fact sheets, find out when their case is listed for hearing and get legal advice from a variety of organizations all via their web browser.

The explosion of legal information and services available to the community online has made the job of finding information increasingly complex.

Accessing the right information quickly is sometimes critical when time limits may affect obtaining remedies or when getting the wrong information may lead to unnecessary costs or other disadvantages. Additionally, as the Internet crosses state and national borders, users can sometimes access incorrect information for the legal jurisdiction they live in. The myriad organizations that deal with legal problems often mean going to numerous web sites to piece together the necessary information on a particular legal problem. LawAccess Online has been developed to start to address these issues.

Facilitating access to information is ISYS:web.asp. Documents indexed on LawAccess Online are catalogued according to an agreed subject index under the JSMS. LawAccess NSW is responsible for the construction of the site and uses a metadata harvesting product called Blue Angel Metastar Harvester and Repository.

ISYS:web.asp interacts with Blue Angel to create its indexes. ISYS:web.asp was selected by the Department because of its ability to integrate with other products, such as Blue Angel.

While ISYS:web.asp can perform full text search across these documents, the Department wanted a precise, structured search, based on the JSMS metadata and ISYS was able to provide this flexibility. The home page of the site displays a series of subjects that the user can select and then drill down to information from across a range of organizations. These taxonomies are based on ISYS:web.asp queries on an SQL database. This process is invisible to the user but as they focus in on their area of interest, ISYS:web.asp is providing the very latest information available from the XML harvest, ensuring the category is always up to date.

Visitors to the site have the option of making a more direct search for the information they require using a search interface. Using ISYS:web.asp to search the metadata fields means that a result is returned with a profile of the document, detailing how recent the document is, who wrote it and a description of its content. Users can initiate searches on a particular subject, language (almost 1/3 of documents currently indexed by LawAccess Online are in languages other than English) and location of the legal service provider. Search terms are highlighted within the profile and each search result gives the option to "Search Within Results" or "Find More Like This".

According to the Attorney General, "over 1,500 quality plain language fact sheets will be available on LawAccess Online collated from across 100 community, government and industry organizations."

LawAccess NSW plans to integrate the search to support its telephone operations, enabling customer service staff to access reliable and accurate legal information online to assist customers with legal problems over the telephone.

As the Attorney General commented in his speech to launch LawAccess NSW, "This is an important step in enhancing access to justice for everyone."

Website: http://www.lawlink.nsw.gov.au