Chapters 4 , 5, 6 - Development of the DIAL Index and DIAL Search prototypes

• Conclusions and recommendations - Desirable characteristics of a permanent system
• General
• DIAL Index
• DIAL Search

Conclusions and recommendations - Desirable characteristics of a permanent system

General

• The development of DIAL will be facilitiated if three forms of co-operation can be achieved:
  • If a number of parties who wish to create complementary indexes can agree to do so within a common framework (a `multi-threaded index') in which DIAL is one thread.
  • If some means of obtaining voluntary collaboration from experts in Internet indexing in particular subject areas, or for particular geographical areas, can be obtained.
  • If (although the primary language of the facility is English) collaboration can be obtained from sites of legal indexing expertise in at least major international legal languages such as Chinese, French, Russian, Spanish, and German.
• DIAL facilities should be developed so as to be accessible by users in DMCs who have low bandwidth Internet connections or only dial-up terminal mode connections, by ensuring that the pages can be accessed by non-graphical browser software (such as Lynx).
• An indication should be provided on sites indexed of whether they are `official' sites.

DIAL Index

• Embedded searches on the same topic over DIAL Search Libraries can can make it possible to develop rapidly a basic level of Development Law Subject pages in DIAL Index, provided that an extensive range of treaties, law reform reports etc is added to DIAL Search. In short, the expansion of DIAL Search can make it possible to develop rapidly a basic level of DIAL Index pages.
• Two levels of Development Law Subject pages should be undertaken: standard (relying to a large extent on embedded DIAL Searches), and comprehensive (involving in addition the country-by-country indexing of legislation, law reform reports etc). Work on the development of standard pages can then progress systematically across a wide list of subject headings.
• A limited range of topics for development of comprehensive Development Law Subject pages should then be chosen based perhaps on factors such as (i) a priority need for such information, based on the known legislative agendas of DMCs; (ii) the Bank's priority areas for development law reform; (iii) the information needs of particular development projects funded by the Bank; (iv) requests received in relation to the information needs of other particular projects, whether by national governments, other development funding agencies, NGOs or otherwise.
• A suitable legal thesaurus should be identified and obtained, accommodating both common law and civil law terminology, to assist in consistent construction of subject headings and terms for embedded searches.
• An investigation should be made of the feasibility of automatically converting every term in a selected thesaurus into a DIAL Search for that word or phrase, so as to assist in rapid construction of basic Development Law Subject pages.

DIAL Search

• Search language offering users a choice of no use of search connectors, or boolean/proximity connectors.
• Ability to limit searches to specific `Libraries', sub-sets of the whole searchable collection.
• Ability to limit searches to a particular database, to allows DIAL Search to be used to search specific sites which have no search engine of their own, or only have a search engine which has limited features.
• Ability to limit searches to a country domain, to be able to be used in conjunction with selection of Libraries .
• Ability to limit searches by language of documents, necessary as the range of non-English materials searchable in DIAL Search increases.
• Display of search results ordered according to likely relevance (`relevance ranking').
• Alternative display of search results grouped by Library and database of origin.