Context Sensitive Awareness in Legal Hypertext

• Autore: Michael A. Heather, B. Nick Rossiter
• Pagine: 31-53

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@1. Introduction

Early hypertext with preset buttons whether determined algorithmically or by human Intervention needs to be upgrades -to be useful for law with provision for dynamic links to be make in context at run time. The current state of the art [Nielsen 1990] is to use dynamic frames but these are more to do with formatting displays rather than for connecting and identifying relevant content. The hypertext markup to related material elsewhere on the Web [Manager 1995] but the user has to provide the means for identifying the material,

However, users need be assured of the quality of their legal information system. The quality controller like in any industrial process has to be at a separate supervisory level This is a trigger mechanism in the system to identify relevant information in context and is also a self awareness where the information checks itself for completeness and its own limitations. Intelligent hypertext is an initial step at this level but intelligence is insufficient without a layer of consciousness. The quality assurance level is a closure Over all participating sub-systems, whether local to the end-user or global and belonging to the information providers.

The information in the subsystems may come in any form or format. Of great importance for law is the image data found in multimedia for the large quantities of documents that are being input by scanners in legal case [Chepalis 1994], A hypertext system that cannot search, identify and retrieve the contents of documents held as image bits has little value for lawyers. A move in this direction to provide features for heterogeneous data can be seen in systems like HyperNet [Marovac & Osbum 1992].

Without proper procedures, the less paper office czxi result in a loss cf integrity. To ensure consistency, some formal model is needed to underpin the interoperable subsystems [Heather & Rossiter (in press)], As information systems are real-world and open, the models need to be drawn from con- Page 32 structive mathematics [Heather & Rossiter 1994] where intuitionistic logic seems to be able to give a high formalism to common sense reasoning and experience,

As legal information systems become larger and more complicated it is very easy for the user to get lost in them. Even intelligent hypertext becomes inadequate, it can provide the user with a non-linear connectivity but to be of value the system needs to know where the user is, where the user has come from and where the user is going, all relative to the contents of the information at any point.

@2. Types of Awareness

But the system also needs to provide of awareness feature. There is the nature of the information relative to the informational needs of the user and incidentals like the appropriate methods of displaying the data relative to the users individual preferences. More important is the self-awareness of the information relative to information elsewhere, for example to a source of continuous updates. Otherwise, hypertext can misinform.

Whether computer will in the future exhibit the characteristics of luman consciousness is an interesting subject of speculation. Of more current importance is the need for information systems to have a current awareness of the contextivity of the information that is available. This encompasses both local disks, CD ROM, etc. under the user's physical control as well as the interaction of these with any central on-line facilities over which the user has electronic control at least as far as access and availability.

Even with the old printed medium there were and still are various levels of information providers and information users, At one end, there is the consciousness that a bock seller has of the availability of information extending little beyond a stock of items currently in market demand or potential demand together with a list of titles arid authors that can be ordered. Unless specialized, the bookseller's awareness will not normally extend beyond books in print. There are librarians who have more regard for the content of the iniormation. This information goes beyond hooks currencly in print and includes the use of bibliographies.

A reference librarian on the other hand has more interaction with the consents of the information. That is the librarian actually opens the books in question. At the other extreme is the lawyer whose function is te dispense the information m the form of advice involving construction and Page 33 application of legal source documents to clients who may never actually see the books themselves or even know that they exist, The lawyer has to have an appreciation of knowing what exists and how to find it. Because of the volume and complexity of the information available, the awareness carried around in the lawyer's head is only how to go about finding some relevant piece of information and not any particular source. It is the sophisticated aim to make conscious reasoned connections that legal hypertext must address.

@@2.1. Conscious Reasoning as Connections

Legal reasoning lies at the heart of the practice of Law implicit in routine procedures and explicit in activities like legal research, legal information retrieval and legal decision making.

Each age has its own view of logic and the application of logic in the wider concept of reasoning. Reasoning today is making connections: making connections between different categories of objects which may be mixed abstract and concrete. To reason is to impose a structure on the objects. This order may be one of many possible. There may be a unique path but in the law there is usually not just one way to reach the same conclusion and sometimes there may be equally valid paths to other conclusions. In terms of discrete mathematics the ordering is to identify relationships between objects.

Whether the objects and relationships are considered separately or wrapped-up together is a matter of viewpoint, The Anglo-Saxon word thoughts express this dichotomy perhaps even better that the word reasoning. Comparable perceptions are to be found in other modern relevant topics such as the object-oriented paradigm and connectionist models like parallelism and neural nets.

The older concept of the continuum has been displaced by discrete objects partly because of strong digital influence from computer science and partly arising from a better understanding of physical processes.

A critical feature in this reasoning is the connections that pass through real-world events. This provides a source of variety and normally determines that to particular path is fixed for all time.

@@2.2. Hypertext Connections Need to Reflect Real-world Links

Interferences in making the right on pragmatic considerations which may be very subject to the peculiarities of the situation or there may be a Page 34 more generalizable context sensitivity. Take a legal question which illustrates this by relying on economic circumstances.

Who pays a higher rent: tenants of controlled or uncontrolled tenancies?

Controlled tenancies are connected to security of tenure so that tenants subject to a controlled tenancy have security of tenure whereas the uncontrolled do not have the same security. As security is more valuable, the first impressions might be that controlled tenants will pay more for the tenancy if secured. In practice? secure tenants on average pay much less than unsecured tenants, It is a matter of making the right connections. Controlled tenancies also have their rents regulated so that they cannot be increased. The real-world situations that need to be connected are that because of the demand for housing, those who cannot obtain controlled tenancies have to take tenancies where is no control over the rent charged.

This is a kind of context sensitivity that shapes the result that uncontrolled tenants pay more. This could be determined by reference to statistical data of mean rents for the different types of regulated property, however, a few moments reflection will show that non empirical knowledge is needed, The correct conclusions can be made by making the right connections. Again, these connections are the only ones that could be made, namely that controlled tenancies only exist in times of shortage for otherwise market forces will keep the rents low.

What form of mapping do the relationships take? Essentially it would seem that they depend on some kind of pattern matching. At the simpler level, it is the identification as in the sequence of characters in connections made through vocabulary. Higher order connections can be made at a very abstract level as in a pattern of legal objects and events, or facts which by induction make a new legal object and which can by a connection of transference amount to a reasoning by analogy. It is the basis of hyperspace navigation that to low-level connections and the high-level reasoning processes are essentially equivalent classes. The question of the practical technology is how to handle these objects and their identities. This is a class of problem relevant to any implementable information system, that is knowledge base, deductive databases, advanced expert systems, as well as hypertext.

The connections are made in a coordinate space which is not cartesian and where the points are objects of some complexity. A human being is a good example of a complex object consisting of a bundle of characteristics with a unique identification. External positions change with time. Internal characteristics depend on time and also on external positions.

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@3. Law as Structure of Identifiable Objects and Relationships

@@3.1. Objects and Sub objects

What are the legal...