ELVIL 2000

Ingrid Cantwell and Magnus Enzell introduce the prototype for the ELVIL 2000 Project, an Academic Portal for European Law and Politics.

Introduction

The European Legislative Virtual Library project (ELVIL) was conceived at the Stockholm University library back in 1995 [1]. The current library co-ordinator was teaching political science students the intricacies of using a telnet interface to access the Swedish Riksdag database and the thought arose that there had to be an easier way to access public information. Couldn't it all be done using the World Wide Web? A lot has happened since then but the basic ideas are still valid and the original problems are still pertinent: how can we increase the availability of public information by using the World Wide Web?

During the ELVIL project the team identified three variables of availability: access, education and communication. Access to public database had to be intuitive and user-centred. Users had to be educated about the content and role of public documentation. Since public documentation is often of a political nature there is also a need for forums to discuss the interpretation of it. The ELVIL-project was completed successfully in 1998 and was directly followed by the ELVIL 2000 project [2].

ELVIL 2000

The general aim of the ELVIL 2000-project is to create and operate an Academic Portal to European Law and Politics. Portal, because we combined access to a number of different types of resources on the same platform. These sources could be divided into three different categories but all intended to be of a “slow nature” as opposed to “fast” information like news. The sources include public documentation and official Web sites, educational modules, discussion and work-platforms. Academic, because we believed that academic standards and principles could greatly enhance the quality of information and communication management on the Internet. The principles of selection and validation could be useful for the Internet and could also be used to a greater extent to ensure a higher degree of trust and reliability on the Internet in general.

While focusing on virtues like speed, accessibility and rapid updates it is easy to forget that the Internet offers unique opportunities for the slower practices of accumulation and reflection on knowledge in a public sphere. ELVIL 2000 is aimed at building platforms that encouraged reflexivity, and the accumulation of “slow” knowledge. ELVIL 2000 has now finalised its second prototype (The “ELVIL-platform”) and will develop models and programs for use on the platform during the next six months.

The current ELVIL platform provides:

• A set of gateways to core political and legal information in the form of parliamentary databases of Sweden, UK, Poland, Czech republic and European Parliament. These gateways offer identical search interfaces with the possibility of parallel search across all databases.
• A web-index of selected web-sites which conforms to the ELVIL policy of quality. Based on those selected sites, one can perform “extended searches” across the links of those sites. There are additional lists of key institutions of all European languages, which provides easy point-and-click access to all the major political institutions in Europe.
• Multilingual support by using EUROVOC as a language switchboard between the user and the database. The user can browse a conceptual hierarchy in one language while the system performs searches in another language.
• An encyclopaedia on European law and politics. For each European country their is a set of articles covering eight core subjects of that particular party, for ELVIL partners there are additional cases which provides narratives based on documentation available in the ELVIL-databases.
• Forums for public discussions on current legislative issues. The forum model encourages users to support their arguments with documentation and educational resources available on ELVIL.
• A workspace for collaborative work. Several users can team up for doing background research in a question, work on a common document or build archives for future work.
• A virtual librarian which uses artificial intelligence for identifying and recommending high quality Web resources on European law and Politics.
• Software support packages facilitates the inclusion of new information resources in the future by shortening development time and reducing cost.

Figure 1: European Union Encyclopaedia on the ELVIL prototype

The current prototype is now available for viewing from the ELVIL site [3].

References

1. ELVIL Project
   URL: < http://www.cordis.lu/libraries/en/projects/elvil.html>
2. ELVIL 2000 Project
   URL: <http://www.cordis.lu/libraries/en/projects/elvil2000.html>
3. ELVIL 2000 current prototype
   URL: <http://elvil.sub.su.se/>

Author Details

Ingrid Cantwell
Co-ordinator

ingrid.cantwell@sub.su.se

Magnus Enzell
Project manager

magnus.enzell@statsvet.su.se

For citation purposes:
Plamen Gradinarov, "ELVIL 2000", Exploit Interactive, issue 7, 2nd October 2000
URL: <http://www.exploit-lib.org/issue7/emerge/>

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