Nowadays, Blockchain Technologies (BCT) could be characterized as one of the most promising trends. We are currently witnessing a plethora of implementations basically in the economic sector with the creation of cryptocurrencies. The majority of researchers and practitioners argues that many benefits could be derived from the use of this innovative technology with the most significant one being the improved sense of trust to BCT applications. At the same time governments pursue amplified trust from their citizens and BCT is gaining momentum since it addresses this of utmost importance problem based on its unique characteristics. More and more governments realize the advances of this technology and participate in pilot applications in different vertical governmental sectors. Even though there are several implementations in the Government sector, there is no comprehensive study towards the analysis of the major characteristics of these developments. This paper moves towards the fulfilment of this gap conducting a thorough analysis of e-Government pilot applications of BCT in a European level. Furthermore, this study discusses the key benefits and main barriers coming from the application of this technology in different domains with BCT experts.

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One of the most promising developments comes with the use of innovative technologies and thus with the availability of novel services. The combination of text mining with legal elements may contribute to the development of many innovative legal IS. Moreover, in the case of public administrations and governments, the distribution, availability, and access towards legal information are essential and urgent. On the other hand, legal data and law texts are a potential open government data category in order for innovation to be achieved, regarding the development of new, better, and more cost-effective services for citizens. Those data need to be available 24/7 basis and compliant towards a standard. Yet, there exist some severe issues at the moment regarding this access. This, in turn, makes the use of automated crawling and analysis more than difficult. This paper describes the “Peri Nomou” system: an innovative legal information system for Greek laws utilising text mining techniques to indexing legal documents, identifying correlations and dividing legal documents into their articles.

In the reality of globalization, the legislation of every country needs to be followed in order to achieve a well-organized globalization process because the rule of Law is a cornerstone, a fundamental foundation of every democratic state and it should be observed and respected by all in the society. The economic and industrial globalization has increased international competition and given rise to the need for an increasingly integrated and evolving legal system but the fundamental debates over globalization of the 1990s more or less petered out, without leading to a clear consensus. So, society is still overwhelmed with an over-load of legal information while in the era of Digital Transformation, technologies such as Big data, artificial intelligence, machine learning, blockchain, 3D promise to have a profoundly disruptive effect on the industry, business models, governance models and on the way we interact with each other in society. However, there is not a legal information system capable of supporting the legislation of all countries in order to facilitate the above operation but there are many initiatives in order to develop legal ontologies. These legal ontologies in combination with the disruptive technologies can be help the problem of fragmented legal information across-border in order to create the Big Linked Open Legal Data.

The globalization of communication networks and the possibilities offered by the information and communication technologies (ICTs) significantly change the public sector's operation and services. Digital Governance is now integrated into administrations' policies and programs at all levels: local, regional, national, European. At the national level, there is a requirement to provide electronic public services according to citizens' needs while, in the sense of globalization, at the European level, there are many programs (e.g., the Europe 2005 and i2010 program) emphasizing the Digital Governance world (or better Digital Governance community) that indicates rapid changes not only in the sense of the change in the public sector's systems but also in the mentality that the public sector operates. On the other hand, Digital Governance's evolution affects societies intensively, emphasizing the importance of cross-border interaction and information sharing between them. [6]. Concerning the legal informatics domain, this can result in changing governments' operations in many ways [2]. By now, the massive amount of each country's legal information currently remains fragmented across multiple national databases and systems or even better legal databases. Most of these legal databases result from the significant advancements in the "legal informatics" research field that observed since governments have started to promote the development of legal information systems [9]. This research contributes to this purpose by developing an open and automated legal system capable of providing any EU country's legal information based on the existing ontologies.