Lima, PhD thesis available
Last year I pointed out a paper by João Alberto de Oliveira Lima. Now his PhD thesis, Modelo Genérico de Relacionamentos na Organização da Informação Legislativa e Jurídica, is available online. It’s in Portuguese, but here’s the English abstract:
In most of the time information does not work in an isolate form and it always belongs to one context, making relationships with other entities. Legislative and legal information, in a certain way, is characterized by their high degree of relationships. Laws, bills, legal cases and doctrine are connected by several forms, creating a rich network of information. Efforts done for the organization of information generate artificial models that try to represent the real world, creating systems and schemes of concepts used in the classification processes and indexing of information resources. This research had the main objective of proposing a Generic Model of Relationship (GMR), based in a simple constructs which permitted the establishment of relationships between concepts and information units. In the conception of GMR were used Ingetraut Dahlberg’s Theory of Concept and the models CIDOC CRM (ISO 21.117:2006), FRBROO and Topic Maps (ISO 13.250:1999). The identification of relationship and the characteristics of information units in a legal domain were collected in the project “Coletânea Brasileira de Normas e Julgados de Telecomunicações”, using the methodology of Action Research. Besides the development of GMR and its application in the legislative and legal information domains, the research also contributed with the definitions of one identification system of documents versions and a new meaning for the term “information unit”.