P2P systems in legal networks: Another "small world" case

The "small world"-paradigm offers a new interesting view-point for the analysis of contemporary legal networks and artificial intelligence. This topological approach sheds further light on such different fields as case-based legal reasoning, knowledge discovery in legal databases, or legal ontologies, as far as clustering coefficients, diameter and hubs of the network are involved. Moreover, empirical evidence shows that even P2P systems as Gnutella present small world-features. So it becomes possible to deepen our understanding of how spontaneous communities organize themselves in the network. While opening new horizons in the field of recommender systems, it also widens our perspective in dealing with such important issues as privacy and digital copyright.