Online 2002, December 2002

This year's Online Exhibition at Olympia was rather disappointing from an EU information perspective. Overall it was smaller than usual: the Gallery area, for example, was not occupied at all. The exhibition itself was dominated by the big players formed through recent mergers, such as LexisNexis Butterworths Tolley and the Thomson group, plus of course the EU stand. Other key EU information providers were absent so it was no longer an opportunity to catch all suppliers in one place and find out the latest developments pre-launch.

The EU stand was running a number of useful presentations of its products and it was also able to demonstrate test versions of new developments. The main focus for Eur-Lex and CELEX is of course the incorporation of the new languages material resulting from enlargement and it is aimed to complete this ahead of accession. Beyond that, work is in hand to include all the original texts of the Treaties on Eur-Lex. For CELEX a News Alert service is being tested and work is being done on a new version of the Expert search. The EUROVOC thesaurus is to be properly integrated into CELEX so that it can be used as a search tool. One of the big planned developments that will be particularly well received results from major changes to the database format and structure to incorporate the nine new languages. Stemming from this work CELEX will in future be able to display tables and graphics in the HTML text versions. Data from April 1999 onwards will be reloaded to change to the new format and the possibility of covering 1992-1999 is under consideration. Watch out for the progress in 2003 at http://europa.eu.int/eur-lex and http://europa.eu.int/celex/htm/celex_en.htm