Linking legal open data: breaking the accessibility and language barrier in european legislation and case law

In this paper we describe how the EUCases FP7 project is addressing the problem of lifting Legal Open Data to Linked Open Data to develop new applications for the legal information provision market by enriching structurally the documents (first of all with navigable references among legal texts) and semantically (with concepts from ontologies and classification). First we describe the social and economic need for breaking the accessibility barrier in legal information in the EU, then we describe the technological challenges and finally we explain how the EUCases project is addressing them by a combination of Human Language Technologies.