Webbie round-up

The IPKat's productive friend Ossi Niiranen has emailed him with the good news that his Catoss search tool has been improved. For the uninitiated,

"Catoss is a site offering free web-based tools ... [for] researching European Union law and EU sources. Catoss is run by EU lawyers (obviously supported by software developers) who need to do research into EU issues on a daily basis, and started the Catoss project as a result of the frustration they experienced with existing research tools that are (i) too expensive, (ii) too cumbersome to use, or both. ...

Catoss currently offers three web-based services.

Catoss EU Legal Search is a search engine that allows users to search through case law from the European Court of First Instance and the Court of Justice, as well as the Commission's merger decisions. The search is powered by the open source Swish-e engine.

Catoss EU News Search is a news search engine that searches through EU press releases and other press material published since 1995. The search is also powered by Swish-e.

Left: we're all Searchers now - and Catoss is a handy way of doing the searching (but not for donuts)

EU Currency Converter is a currency converter supporting currency conversion both with current rates and using historical date, as well as average exchange rates for a calendar year. The currency data is based on the rates published by the European Central Bank".

Readers of this blog are welcome to put Catoss through its paces and then tell Ossi what they think of it. The IPKat has done some of his own little tests. He had lots of fun with it - under the Legal Search he got 33 hits for "cat", six for "Edenborough" and one each for "zeppelin", "troll" and "knickers" - but his search under "donuts" failed to retrieve Case T-333/04 House of Donuts v OHIM. He would also quite like the words "Nothing found" to leap up on to the screen if his search produces no results; at present the words "no results" appear in discreet lower case letters on the tab line of his Microsoft Explorer, where he wouldn't normally think of looking for it.


Readers who don't follow the comments that are posted on this weblog may have missed the news that IP::JUR guru, Patentanwalt and blogger Axel H Horns has been tinkering (his word, not the IPKat being rude) with the MediaWiki software. He tells us: "You can see a Beta version of a "wikified" EPC2000 here and here". Axel will be pleased if you email him here and tell him what you think.