Charts the Union's development from its conception through to the implementation of the Maastricht Treaty and its continuing activities. Includes an A-Z section of concise definitions and explanations of organizations, acronyms and terms. The most extensive collection of information available on the European Union. The third edition of this definitive reference work has been thoroughly revised and updated to provide the latest information on the EU. It charts the Union's development from its conception through to the creation of the single market in 1992, to the implementation of the Maastricht Treaty and its continuing activities. Contents include: An A-Z section of concise definitions and explanations of organizations, acronyms and terms, plus short articles on the member states. A series of introductory articles providing a broader view of the policies and activities of the EU. Statistical data for the entire EU on trade, employment and industrial production. An extensive directory of key names, addresses, phone and fax numbers, e-mail and internet addresses for all major European Union institutions and official bodies. Details of MEPs, their political groups and national parties, members of major committees, Directorates-General and other commission bodies.

This comprehensively updated edition of European Union aims to provide readers with a thorough understanding of every aspect of the EU, from its origins, aims and achievements to current and likely developments.

This volume is a presentation of all methods of legal knowledge representation from the point of view of jurisprudence as well as computer science. A new method of automatic analysis of legal texts is presented in four case studies. Law is seen as an information system with legally formalised information processes. The achieved coverage of legal knowledge in information retrieval systems has to be followed by the next step: conceptual indexing and automatic analysis of texts. Existing approaches of automatic knowledge representations do not have a proper link to the legal language in information systems. The concept-based model for semi-automatic analysis of legal texts provides this necessary connection. The knowledge base of descriptors, context-sensitive rules and meta-rules formalises properly all important passages in the text corpora for automatic analysis. Statistics and self-organising maps give assistance in knowledge acquisition. The result of the analysis is organised with automatically generated hypertext links. Four case studies show the huge potential but also some drawbacks of this approach.