Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen,

I’d like to start with a very brief introduction. Context is an electronic publishing company. We publish a range of CDs, online and Internet titles covering UK and EU legislation and case law as well as business information.

As the title of my talk suggests, I intend to concentrate on the linking facility of Context’s software rather than the databases themselves. I will demonstrate how the JUSTIS 5 software can enable faster and more flexible research. And with the new development of floating J-Link, how you can link your own information directly to full text documents running under JUSTIS. You will be able to create a seamless source of EU information for your organisation.

The database I shall be using is JUSTIS CELEX. Full details of these and other databases can be found in the exhibition, but briefly….

CELEX is the official legal database of the European Communities. It's content and structure reflects the legal entity of the European Union. It provides the source texts of EU law from all the major institutions of the EU. CELEX also gives an insight into the interaction between these institutions, both in the creation of legislation and the judgments which interpret it. CELEX is an essential tool for anyone who has to take into account EU legislation in their work.

CELEX is a vast database containing the series of treaties, which form the primary legislation of the EU, the secondary legislation, in the form of directives, decisions & regulations etc, proposals for future legislation, the decisions of the European Court of Justice and questions asked in the European Parliament.

These distinct but interdependent components are organised in separate databases and this enormous and sophisticated database is increasing by over 7000 documents a year. That is about 144 documents a week.

In addition, about 30-40% of new legislation amends previous pieces of legislation. So you can imagine that cross-referencing is very important. Indeed, CELEX does have an extensive cross-referencing system which enables you to track the progress of any piece of legislation. For example, starting from the proposal itself, through its consultative stages until it becomes an active directive or regulation. It is also possible to follow any case law arising out of any directive.

Context’s J-Link technology allows you to maximise the use of these hundreds of thousands of cross-references within the CELEX database. J-Link will enable you to quickly link back and forth avoiding the need for any unnecessary searching!

J-Link allows cross-referencing within the same database and between different JUSTIS databases.

For example, you can link from the bibliographic database held on JUSTIS European References CD-ROM to a European Community directive in JUSTIS CELEX. To do this you would simply highlight the reference and click the J-Link button on the toolbar. It doesn’t matter that the documents exist in separate databases.

• Quick Search for any document with ‘driving licence*’ in the title
• Result = 31 hits
• We find a bibliographic reference to an EU Directive.
• By highlighting the document number and clicking on the J-Link button on the toolbar we link directly to the full text of Directive 96/47 in JUSTIS CELEX.

• We see that in the title of this directive it refers to an amending Directive 91/439.
• Highlight the reference, click on the J-Link button and link to the amending directive.
• Clicking on the Go Back button takes us back to Directive 96/47

• To explore the original proposal for the directive we can use J-Link.
• And then we may wish to look at the opinion from the Economic & Social Committee or the European Parliament.

• Alternatively, we may be looking at a European Court of Justice case report.
• We look to see what the legislative base is for this case and we see a reference to a treaty article.
• J-Link will take us directly to that article.

More remarkably, however, J-Link allows you to link from external sources.

I’d like to introduce the most exciting element to this new technology - the fact that it also works outside the JUSTIS databases. This means you can exploit the many citations within your other applications.

Users run a very small memory resident program that puts a floating J-Link icon on your Windows desktop.

When reading text in an e-mail or word document you may see a publication reference, to a European directive for example. You will be able to call up the full text of that document almost instantly. Just by clicking the J-Link icon on your desktop.

J-Link allows references in virtually any database, word processing file, even e-mail or a Web site, to automatically link to the JUSTIS range of databases. The "soft hypertext" linking technique, which J-Link introduces, has important implications for all users of electronic information.

• A reference to a European Court of Justice case in an e-mail to the full text of that case in JUSTIS CELEX, Case Law database.
• A reference to the Treaty of Rome, article 100a, in a university lecturer's teaching notes posted on the university’s Intranet to the full text of the article in JUSTIS CELEX, Treaties database.
• A reference to a Directive on an Internet web site to the full text in JUSTIS CELEX, Legislation database.
• Your own in-house catalogue database to the full text document on a JUSTIS database.

This is by no means an exhaustive list. J-Link will work from most Windows applications, including word processors, e-mail, Intranets and the Internet, provided you subscribe to the relevant JUSTIS database.