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3.2. South Australia


The Court Services Department in South Australia has developed JURIS, a
judicial support system, and LIS, a litigation support system, with a very
high level of integration, and of potential use to other parties in the
criminal process. JURIS and LIS are part of a more general strategy of
computerisation of court functions which has been pursued by the Department
since the late-1980's. Some other elements of the Courts Computerisation
Program are civil and criminal registry systems (integrated at all three
levels of Courts), case flow management, listings, and computer-aided
transcription (CAT). These applications are largely table driven, with the
same data serving different needs in different applications. Electronic data
transfers occur between the Courts and the Justice Information System (JIS),
an offender-based tracking system, and SA Police Department.

JURIS and LIS are accessible to all three levels of the South          [PP34]
Australian courts through terminals located in courthouses and
chambers throughout the State. Most users obtain access through 'dumb'
terminals, but some members of the judiciary obtain access through laptop
personal computers.


JURIS - Judicial Research Information System


The JURIS research components were developed from 1989 and released to the
judiciary in 1990: see South Australia Court Services Department (1991). The
research component of JURIS is extensive, consisting (as at May 1992) of:

o  Judgments (4763), principally of the South Australian Supreme Court (many
   in full text) but also some District Court judgments and summaries of
   judgments from other jurisdictions;
   
o  Articles (2228), mostly only bibliographic references, not full text;
   
o  Summing-up precedents, Court Bench Books, and Forms of Order for the
   Magistrates' Courts (192 entries);
   
o  Appellate pronouncements (155 entries);
   
o  Selected South Australian Acts (41), for which historically retrospective
   versions are to be maintained on the system; selected Commonwealth Acts;
   and Rules of Court;
   
o  Damages Award Enquiries (268), derived from a special form of summary of
   all personal injuries cases maintained on the system. Development of a
   similar form of Sentencing Enquiry system is planned.
   
The key to the use of JURIS is that all texts (cases, articles, Act or
sections of Acts etc) entered into the system are classified (in effect,
indexed) according to 'Topics', the list of Topics constituting a multi-level
structured legal thesaurus with a controlled vocabulary based on the Manual of
Law Reporting and conforming to the Australian Digest headings. Some minor
items are not allocated Topics but can be searched for in other ways (eg by
title or catchwords). Over 6,000 Topics are used at present. Editorial control
of the content of JURIS is through the JURIS Data Input Committee, consisting
of Olsson J, and representatives of the District Court and Magistracy, which
Committee assigns Topics to all text items included.

All of these applications have been developed in-house by the Court Services
Department, using the Oracle RDBMS (relational database management software)
on SUN hardware under its version of the UNIX operating system.

A consequence of the use of relational database software for these research
tasks is that JURIS does not provide true free text retrieval using a
concordance (a word-occurrence index). Instead, heavy reliance is placed upon
the allocation of Topics, and to access through selection of appropriate
Topics. In effect, the primary means of access to the system is through an
extensive table of contents. An advantage of this approach is that search
methods are consistent and easy to learn. A potential disadvantage is that it
is highly dependent upon expert and assiduous indexing. Where text searching
of non-indexed fields is needed, JURIS relies instead on a more limited form
of retrieval than free-text retrieval, sequential scanning (discussed later in
relation to transcript searching).


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