# On the Future of Legal Publishing Services in the Semantic Web
## 5 The Strategic Objectives of the OP within the Semantic Web  
The revolution of digital services carried by the advent of the Web and its developments, previously discussed, brings about challenges particularly sensitive for the legal domain, affecting legal information providers and their production channels. In this context, the Publications Office of the EU (OP), as main inter-institutional legal information service provider, has recently defined orientations to tackle such challenges at either technological, political or financial point of views [33].  
The technological changes are drivers of changes in the way how the OP will provide information services, on behalf of EU institutions, directly to the citizens and to businesses or other types of professional organizations. This holds in particular as regards reusing services for both commercial and non-commercial purposes. Such changes are strictly linked to the semantic evolution of the Web and the associated digital services, in particular Open Data ones. Therefore, OP has identified mid-term and long-term strategic objectives shaped around these technological changes and priorities.  
Mid-term strategic objectives, to be achieved by 2020, can be summed up as follows [33]:  
1. Exchange all legal data with institutions in a secure and automated way based on common standards (metadata and content in a structured format);
2. Facilitate the rationalization of the publication contracts of the EU institutions and provide interoperable formats and collaborative production workflows for multichannel production of highly structured content;
3. Focus linguistic quality-control processes on consistency, content analysis, data structuring and new media, including social media;
4. Link the information available on the portals managed by the Office (ex: EUR-Lex, Publications Office portal, TED (tenders documentation), CORDIS (research and development information services), EU Open Data Portal) with other EU information available online, increase interoperability and provide federated search and access services (seamless navigation experience). Long-term strategic objectives, to be achieved by 2025, are identified in the following [33]:
5. Implement act-by-act production of the Official Journal in order to achieve a more flexible, faster and simplified way of publishing;
6. Be the reference production centre for the EU institutions for publication material (all content fully accessible for any device and fully accessible for disabled users);
7. Implement a new distribution concept to achieve a zero-stock objective;
8. Manage a single point of access (one-stop shop) for all services related to the management and publication of public procurement data, including procurement by EU institutions;
9. Manage a fully operational legal deposit scheme for all publications of the EU institutions (preservation and access in digital format);10. Be the central point of access to and reuse of public sector information from EU institutions, thus contributing to the creation of innovative products and services by businesses.  
Such objectives are highly influenced by the semantic evolution of the Web, and seem to be mainly driven by the dynamic nature of digital publications seen as a set of objects endowed with specific identity and meaning, as well as consumed on different media (considering the paper as just one and not principal medium), subject to specific modality of preservation and accessibility. On the other hand, OP strategic objectives foresee an evolution of the accessibility to legal information which is mainly influenced by the Linked Open Data approach to the Semantic Web, which considers information objects as a set of building-blocks for the development of added-value services, which derive from datasets mash-up and can leverage crowdsourcing in the social Web.