26 November 2021: our work, survey 2021

ecoi.net survey 2021: What we won’t implement

The following suggestions or wishes were made by some survey participants:

1. Collecting case law or jurisprudence
2. More translations
3. Keywording of documents

We’ll discuss these points in more detail:

1. Collecting case law or jurisprudence

ecoi.net aims to contribute to fair and efficient asylum procedures by providing easy and quick access to an up-to-date and comprehensive collection of relevant country information.

Case law and jurisprudence, especially decisions on international protection, are deliberately not part of our collection.

We recommend using other databases that are specialized in that field, like UNHCR’s Refworld, asyl.net by Informationsverbund Asyl & Migration, as well as ECRE’s EDAL, or national legal databases, such as Austria’s RIS.

In principle close to COI are positions and guidance documents, like those from UNHCR or EASO. These are collected on ecoi.net and they frequently contain COI or references to COI.

2. More translations / more languages

The suggestions from our users regarding languages concern two aspects:

• The content of our collection (i.e. the documents’ languages), and
• the languages of our user interface

English is the most often used language in our field. This fact is also reflected in our collection. Most documents available are in the English language, some are in German and fewer are in French or other languages.

ecoi.net’s survace is available in English and German. This means that the brief summaries we provide to describe each document are available in those two languages as well. Composing these summaries or even translations of entire documents is very resource-intensive.

To lower language barriers in other ways, we provide the following:

• A Thesaurus is connected to our search engine: when you search for a term contained in the Thesaurus, ecoi.net automatically also searches for synonyms, near-synonyms and terms in other languages. The Thesaurus was developed especially for the field of COI and is fully bi-lingual (English and German). Additionally, selected terms were translated into Italian in a project with the COI unit of the Austrian Federal Office for Asylum and Migration.
• We are currently testing the automatic translation of search terms (by Google Translate). This is also a project with the COI unit of the Austrian Federal Office for Asylum and Migration. It would allow the use of search terms in any language, receiving English language results.
• The automatic translation of the entire interface, including documents, was developed by UNHCR Japan for their target groups. Other partners (also in Asia) are currently working on similar solutions. It is ensured that users are made aware that automatic translations have to be used carefully.

3. Keywording (tagging) of documents

The keywording (or tagging) of documents, meaning the categorization and filtering of documents along the topics they deal with, was suggested by some users.

The keywording would need to be completed for all collected documents to be comprehensible. It would therefore use a lot of resources. To help finding documents through our search engine, ecoi.net provides brief summaries describing each document. These summaries contain the main topics of each document.

If you want to share your thoughts or suggestions, please do not hesitate to contact us: info@ecoi.net.