Model and ontology based conceptual searching in legislative XML collections

The migration of legislative archives into Internet, the imminent "semantic web" and the expectations generated from such processes make it necessary and possible, thanks to the technologies now available, to proceed to the review of information systems and data. The access of the citizen to the legislative data will be in fact not only virtual but effective only if the informative systems will be adapted to such not specialized user. It will be necessary to modify the systems and the data: appropriate interfaces will make it easier and in some way guide the access of common user. The data also should be transparent and enriched with meta data, able to point out and make it comprehensible the meaningful aspects, also according to various user profiles. In this paper we present a model able to describe the illocutionary profile of legislative texts through meta data and an application for conceptual retrieval, based both on the model and on domain concepts ontologies. 1. Formal and functional text patterns Documentary systems are aimed at identifying, in large­sized collections, the documents meeting the user’s requirements – whether by subject­matter or not. To that end, they are provided with all the information allowing the individual documents to be distinguished as well as with summary guidelines on the basic subject. After the relevant documents have been found, the search is over: fruition of the documents is a step falling outside the scope of documentary systems. Nowadays archives including fully on­line documents are increasingly common: in this case, fruition is