A project for the transformation of greek legal documents into legal open data

In modern states, the operation of the three branches of government (executive, legislative and judicial) results in the generation of a huge volume of data (e.g. legislative documents, decisions, reports, statistics etc.). Publication of government data in the form of Open Data is expected, among other benefits, to drive economic development and promote transparency. This is also true for legal data, since new services for citizens, companies, legal professionals and governments could emerge as a result of the availability of Legal Open Data. Since such information is usually published in unstructured formats, automated approaches could highly facilitate the transformation of unstructured data into structured Open Data, according to the 5-star Open Data scheme. In this paper, we present an ongoing project about the automated analysis and processing of Greek legal documents for their transformation into Legal Open Data. We briefly review the current state of Legal Open Data in Greece, we present the project's research questions and analyze our initial thoughts for the implementation methodology; we discuss the challenges of such an effort and finally we elaborate the expected contributions.