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Demonstrations 
Lawfinder: a legal portal search engine
For Information for Lawyers Ltd (IFL) we have developed
a specialist UK legal search engine and portal website. Visit www.infolaw.co.uk
now to see this in action! (Registration for a trial account is free.)
Features
- Data collection
- "Polite" graphical windows-based webcrawler
- Data uploading forms
- Search engine
- Cases, statutes and many other categories
- MySQL with full text indexes
- Sorted, paginated results with active linking to external resources
- Users
- Users have own accounts on site
- User suggestion system
- E-commerce enabled
Description
1. The web-crawler is written in Perl-TK.
We use Perl-TK instead of Visual Basic as this gives access
to the full power of Perl's regular expression and array handling capability.
2. The infolaw website is a large
repository of legal data and categorised resources, created by IFL Ltd.
Lawfinder is a subscription service, allowing access to these resources by browsing categories:
or by searching on keywords:
The keyword search uses special features of MySQL which enable full text indexing
with some degree of control (setting up stop-word lists and other internal
parameters). The keyword search was also carefully designed to work across
several internally defined metadata fields used in the categorisation of legal
data.
Results are displayed in pages with a navigation bar.
Links go out to external resources on the web. Comments and other useful detail may be
added by the infolaw team:
3. To go with lawfinder, we developed a fully featured subscription based access system with
administration forms. This is backed up by a weekly emailing and alerting system, and
custom software for mailing newsletters to registered users.
Registered users may also comment on articles via a "suggest" system which
feeds into the lawfinder administration pages.
4. The infolaw site is e-commerce enabled using a standard secure payment gateway which
we married into the user registration and subscription system:
