BestPortal: lessons learned in lightweight semantic access to court proceedings

The BestPortal is part of an initiative that aims to improve the ability of citizens to determine their legal position. Publishing court proceedings is a natural step to improve access and transparency of the legal system. We discuss the limitations of both such an 'open data' approach, and of more traditional knowledge intensive approaches, and present a flexible mechanism that allows us to bridge the gap between legal and layman conceptualisations of the world. This approach has been implemented as a publicly accessible portal and uses the BestMap ontology to define mappings between the two vocabularies.