Developing a semantic legal research interface for the OECD Services Trade Restrictiveness Index

The Services Trade Restrictiveness Index is an OECD policy tool that helps identify regulatory measures that restrict trade. It includes a database of services regulations for 22 sectors in 42 countries, covering legal texts in more than 20 languages. Keeping this database up-to-date on a yearly basis is a priority for the OECD. As the information spans over 18,000 regulations, it is difficult to monitor changes in the underlying data. The aim of a semantic-based legal research assistant is to identify via government web sites, any change in the regulations that are used as a source in the STRI database. In this contribution, we will present first results using natural language processing and semantic enrichment techniques applied to open sources of law in 3 countries (Chile, France and New Zealand) for a set of 50 key regulatory measures affecting trade in services. We will show that this approach has great potential as it could easily be extended to other OECD topics and to other countries for which the adequate data sources are available.