CULTEXP: the first multilingual and cross-jurisdictional database on cultural expertise

Multicultural societies need cultural expertise for solving conflicts.

Cultural expertise is to date provided by specialists as specialised and expensive services of expert witnessing and conflict settlement in court and out-of-court. Cultural expertise is not available outside specialised circles of legal professionals.

In order to foster the transfer of knowledge about cultural expertise, EURO-EXPERT created CULTEXP as the first multilingual, cross-jurisdictional legal database on cultural expertise.

CULTEXP generates an expectation of impact including both societal and economic benefits for the resolution of conflicts and the ascertainment of rights that require cross-cultural knowledge. This PoC will test CULTEXP for its potential of social interest commercialisation.

In the present form CULTEXP is a “stripped back” demonstrator holding about 4000 case law and 1000 expert reports from Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, India, Malta, the Netherlands, Pakistan, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom.

CULTEXP’s design is unprecedented for its focus on cultural expertise but also for its architecture which uses ad hoc created or adapted OA software allowing cross-jurisdictional and multilingual search, powered by a combination of human and machine translation.

Compared with existing legal databases CULTEXP is extensively more performant because it reaches cross-sectorally most types of legal professions.

CULTEXP searches simultaneously across fields of law and languages, provides country specific legal citations, and full texts with translation option; it is free for users, accessible without training, and inexpensive to run.

If CULTEXP can be successfully tested, we will establish a start-up with a protect community interest focusing on Open Access, inclusion of non-Anglophone knowledge, inclusion of non-Anglophone users, benefit for disadvantaged social groups, and relief to the taxpayers.