User-centric decision support system design in legal informatics - a typology of users.

Accurate, target-oriented, and timely legal information is a strategic input in effective decision-making for a plethora of actors within society. However, the ability of citizens, businesses, local administrations, national governments and European institutions to fully harness this latent potential presupposes an adequate understanding of the procedures of the legal system at all levels of government, and an advanced knowledge of where to find these data sources. As technological sophistry has increased, decision support tools, services and systems have come more and more to encompass not just hardware involved in the automation of decision-making processes, but also the software applications focusing on supporting human cognitive reasoning. Mechanisms that facilitate the systematic searching and sorting of large quantities of information within textual databases through the application of advanced document management techniques can, in fact, support actors during the process of decision-making. The envisioned system aims at the conceptualisation and development of the proper environment for semantically annotated Big Open Legal Data (BOLD), one that makes it easily searchable and exploitable with proper visualization techniques. It is founded on the premise that decision support is a specific service targeted at expert user groups, located within a larger bundle of offerings. This research paper contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the legal information ecology through the development of a taxonomy of potential users of legal information, based on a critical exploration of legal information needs and legal information search and retrieval strategies. We argue that the provision of decision support is highly relevant to a wide number of actors in differing contexts to effectuate e-government processes within society, and is, in consequence, not just a dedicated tool or service, but instead the sum total of the services that the system under consideration proposes to offer.