This paper, by Ginevra Peruginelli, examines the general issue of mapping concepts of different legal orders, with a focus on legal terminology and semantics of the law. Interoperability between legal thesauri is a possible operative solution in so far as it meets two important functions: cross-collection retrieval and cross-language retrieval. At a practical level a feasibility study, carried out by the Institute of Legal Information Theory and Techniques of the National Research Council of Italy is described. The study aims at aligning a number of thesauri used in e-government services within the EU, while testing new methods of automatic mapping.

Mark Scott and Nigel Smith provide the background to the development of Sweet & Maxwell's Legal Taxonomy before outlining its structure and explaining how it is used by Sweet & Maxwell and other Thomson Reuters companies.

Martin Jones of Advice Services Alliance describes a specialist classification scheme and thesaurus devised for use by the general public when searching for legal advice on free websites, and explains how it is implemented and maintained.

Vanda Broughton describes the methodology of constructing a thesaurus from a faceted classification for law (Bliss Bibliographic Classification 2nd ed. Class S). The structure of the classification is described, and the way in which the thesaural relationships are derived from this is demonstrated. Recent work to automate the process, using the encoded classification data used for the schedule display and alphabetical index, is explained. Examples of the way in which this functions are included, and an analysis of the output shows where editorial work will help to improve the resulting thesaurus.

Katherine Dawson, from Citizens Advice Information Team, explains how they have developed and maintain two separate databases of information, using various metadata and classification tools. Adviceguide is a free site for the general public to access information on the legal and societal issues of daily living. Advisernet is a more detailed site giving in-depth information to advisers working in Bureaux.

Stella Dextre Clarke, our Guest Editor, provides an update on the latest developments nationally and internationally on producing standards for the creation of controlled vocabularies. After many years of inaction the advent of the worldwide web has stimulated the need for wholesale revision of existing standards and the introduction of new ones.

Elizabeth Marley describes the addition of subject and other indexing metadata at the UK Parliament, contributing to the internal databases and to services to the public on the Parliamentary website, and the operation of the thesauri and controlled vocabularies used in enriching Parliamentary content.