The European Foreign Policy Bulletin online

The European Foreign Policy Bulletin online:
BY SIEGLINDE SCHREINER-LINFORD AND BARBARA CIOMEI

(Managing Editor and Database Administrator and Assistant Editor, European Foreign Policy Bulletin online)

Since April 1998 a prototype version of the European Foreign Policy Bulletin online has been available on the worldwide web. This full-text database brings together the documents issued by the European Union in the area of foreign policy since 1985. It now contains about 5,000 documents. The Bulletin is published by the Academy of European Law at the European University Institute.

Background:
In 1993 the Maastricht Treaty on European Union (TEU) established the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) of the European Union. CFSP replaces European Political Co-operation (EPC) which had grown as a network for communication and co-operation between governments of the Member States in the area of foreign policy matters since the 1970s. In the new framework of CFSP, the Union adopts legally binding decisions (common positions, joint actions), issues political declarations (press statements, statements to international organisations and conferences), and participates in the debates of the European Parliament with statements and answers to oral and written questions.

The European Foreign Policy Bulletin:
The European Foreign Policy Bulletin online is the continuation of a project initiated jointly by the European University Institute (EUI) and the Institut für Europäische Politik in Bonn. The Bulletin has been edited at the EUI since 1987. Ten printed volumes were published, covering the years from 1985 to 1994. The freely available on-line database now replaces the traditional paper copy.

The first aim of the Bulletin is to bring together the great variety of official documents issued in this area. Many of them are formally published, but they are widely dispersed and often their availability is much delayed: declarations of the European Council and press statements are published in the Bulletin of the European Union; joint actions and common positions as well as statements in the European Parliament and answers to oral and written questions can be found in various series of and annexes to the Official Journal; and joint declarations are circulated as press statements. Statements in international conferences and fora are the most obscure-often, but not always, published by the Presidency. We have always made great efforts to collect and include as much of this otherwise inaccessible material.

The situation has taken an interesting twist with the propagation of EU documentation on the Internet. More documents are available within a shorter time. But on-line publication follows the same institutional divisions as printed publications and therefore finding all potentially relevant documents remains a problem not easily solved by the casual reader, while discerning exactly what a specific document is (an official statement, a draft, background material?) can be a challenge.

The second aim of the Bulletin is to analyse and index documents in a way that allows the reader to select particular documents relevant to their area of research. Several indexes were specifically developed for the Bulletin. Consulting these indexes it is possible to identify all documents dealing with

- CFSP(EPC) structure itself

- formal contacts with third countries, international organisations and political groupings

- countries and regions

- international organisations and political groupings

- subject matters (issues).

The indexes are open-ended to allow inclusion of new developments. All coding is kept as reliable and consistent as possible.

The database:
The database contains the title and full text of the documents and descriptive information about them (date and place of issue, Presidency and status of document). At the moment it brings together all documents published in the printed volumes (1985-1994), plus all documents issued in 1995 and all documents issued since the beginning of 1998. Newly issued documents are now included into the database as they become available. The 1996 and 1997 documents will be integrated into the database in the very near future - faced with the necessarily very long delay in publishing the printed Bulletin and the uphill battle of trying to catch up with a backlog, we decided to follow a well-known example and make the on-line service available now, even if there is a gap in coverage, rather than to await completion before giving access to any material.

Publishing in a database on the worldwide web makes it possible to provide documents to our readers as fast as they become available to us. The search interface makes working with a big, and growing, collection of documents easier and faster. It is possible to select sets of documents in a way that would be very timeconsuming, if not downright impossible, with a printed index. We also believe that placing this collection on the worldwide web will make it more widely accessible to the interested public. For the future we are also considering publication on CD-ROM in addition to the database.

The database is implemented in Information Dimensions' BASIS+, a relational database management system with specific capabilities to deal with textual information. The search interface uses the Sybilla front-end, a TCL-based application development framework for the worldwide web. This front-end allows complex searches without knowledge of a database interrogation language.

Searching the database:
All database fields can be searched, and single searches can be connected with Boolean operators. Combining date of issue, status of document, number of document, Presidency, title and text makes it possible to find - for example - all press statements or answers to oral questions published since 1 January 1998, dealing with Afghanistan, or all documents issued during the Italian Presidency in 1985 which deal with East Timor.

It is possible to search the title and the full text of documents for words or phrases. Words can also be connected with Boolean operators. Searching for a phrase will find occurrences of all search terms within a sentence: 'biological weapon*' will find all documents that contain the phrase 'biological weapon' or 'biological weapons' or 'biological weaponry' or 'biological and chemical weapons', but not a document that mentions 'weapons' in one paragraph and 'biological' in another. This facility is also very useful when looking for a combination of words with a specific meaning like 'World Bank' or 'White House' or a name like 'John Major'.

The result of a search is a list of documents meeting the search criteria, and for any of these it is then possible to view the complete descriptive information and the full text.

In the near future it will also be possible to search all index fields. These fields will support hierarchical searches, i.e. a search for 'human rights' will find all documents coded in sub-categories like 'minorities' or 'religious freedom'. Lists of keywords will be directly available for the search, and therefore the user will be able to make as exact a choice of terms as possible, while problems of acronyms and spelling mistakes will be avoided.

Neither full text searching nor searchable indexes alone are completely satisfactory. Full text search cannot give good results for conceptual terms and indexing cannot foresee all user queries. But combining them gives the double benefit of high recall (capacity to find relevant documents) and high precision (capacity to hold back irrelevant documents). A properly indexed database therefore gives a much higher level of functionality than a mere collection of on-line documents.

Perspectives:
There is a growing number of official and unofficial websites publishing more and more from and about the European Union. This definitely helps to improve access to documentation for researchers and the interested public. But it also poses serious questions of information overload - how to find relevant information across institutional boundaries and how to evaluate the quality of sources. We hope that subject-orientated collections providing analytical tools like ours will contribute in a practical way to the solution of these problems and therefore to the work of those interested in this specific area.

Notes:
European Foreign Policy Bulletin onlinehttp://www.iue.it/EFPB/Welcome.html

The Internet version of European Foreign Policy Bulletin, formerly called European Political Co-operation Documentation Bulletin. General Editors: Renaud Dehousse and Joseph H.H. Weiler. Managing Editor and Database Administrator: Sieglinde Schreiner-Linford. Assistant Editor: Barbara Ciomei.

Academy of European Law
European University Institute
Badia Fiesolana
Via dei Roccettini 9
I-50016 San Domenico di Fiesole (FI)
Italy
E-mail: efpb@iue.it

Publication of the European Foreign Policy Bulletinis undertaken on a non-profit basis. The Internet version should be cited as European Foreign Policy Bulletin online. All documents may be reproduced, provided their source is indicated. No part of the key-word coding or the database design may be reproduced without prior written permission of the copyright holder.