- 8. Conclusions and future challenges

8. Conclusions and future challenges

The approach to providing effective access to legal materials on the internet which uses the techniques and tools developed at AustLII and which are now being given an extensive testing with the Project DIAL prototype is promising at this stage but there are many challenges yet to be overcome. Whether and how the Project DIAL prototype is advanced to further stages after the prototype is complete is a matter for the Asian Development Bank.

However, it seems to us at this stage that the development of maintainable and useful world-wide law index may be possible, provided that three forms of co-operation can be achieved:

The size of the task probably means that it is most feasible if a number of `stakeholders' who wish to create complementary indexes can agree to do so within a common framework (what we have called a `multi-threaded index');
The continuing development and maintenance of the index may need to be geographically dispersed, with indexers in different locations responsible for parts of the index; and
The multi-lingual nature of legal materials on the web means that co-operation is required between sites of legal indexing expertise in at least major international legal languages such as English, Chinese, French, Russian, Spanish, and German.

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