• Journal of the Korean Society for Library and Information Science
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• v.45 no.2
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• pp.345-366
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• 2011

The law affects our daily lives, and hence, constitutes a crucial information resource. However, electronic access to legal information using keyword-based retrieval systems appears to provide users with limited satisfaction. There are many factors behind this inadequacy. First, the discrepancies between formal legal terms and their counterparts in common language are quite large. Second, the situation is further confounded by frequent abbreviations in legal terms. Third, even though there is a constant deluge of legal information, users' needs have evolved to demand more Q and A type searches. All of these factors make the existing retrieval systems inefficient and ineffective. This article suggests an ontology-based system as a means to deal with such difficulties. To that end, a legal retrieval system(experimental system), built on the basis of a newly-constructed law ontology, was tested against a keyword-based legal retrieval system(existing one), yielding data on their relative effectiveness in retrieval and user satisfaction.