MS-Word to SGML Conversion

Comment
This project was part of Irosoft's mandate to develop the electronic document management system, Droit Civil en Ligne.

Project Overview

Converting Federal and Provincial Legal Documents on Civil Law (DCL Project)

• Client: Les Éditions Yvon Blais
• Mandate: As part of the project to develop "Droit Civil en Ligne" (a Web site for consulting civil law), converted all legal jurisprudence, legislation and doctrine to SGML
• Services Provided: Consultation, conversion of existing data
• Technology Used: XML/SGML, MS-SQL, Omnimark, IroXSGML

Client's Problem

Les Éditions Yvon Blais wanted to have a Web site that would serve as a single entrance point for subscribed users to access all civil law texts from Quebec and Canada.

As part of this project, the source documents, which were in MS-Word (jurisprudence and legislation) or Ventura format (doctrines), had to be converted to SGML.

This project involved thousands of source documents. One of the problems involved was retaining the cross-references between the different texts and translating them into hyperlinks.

Solution Proposed

Irosoft carried out the entire conversion project and developed a tool that automatically translated textual cross-references between different documents into hypertext links.

Irosoft also oversaw quality control for the conversion, and made the necessary manual changes when there were abnormalities in the source files that could not be automatically corrected.

Strengths

• Uses the standard DOCBOOK DTD
• Automatically detects legal references
• Fully automated conversion process
• Has bidirectional links between document collections