The European conflicts guide

This article describes a project which involved an attempt to integrate an expert system with a hypertext database of primary and secondary text materials. Our chosen legal domain was that of the Convention on Jurisdiction and the Enforcement of Judgments in Civil and Commercial Matters (The Brussels Convention 1968). In this article, we address three dimensions of system design. With regard to the legal dimension, we consider the choice of domain and the representation of both knowledge and data in the system. On the technological dimension, we discuss the selection of software development tools and problems associated with keeping knowledge bases and databases up-to-date. Finally, we pay particular attention to the `Cinderella' dimension of legal expert system development -- the user interface.