Indonesia’s Dattabot, HukumOnline develop legal search engine

• Dattabot has extracted information from 30,000 legal documents
• There is no premium or paid service for using the search engine

JAKARTA-based data analytics company Dattabot, previously Mediatrac, joins forces with legal media and reference company HukumOnline to develop what they say is Indonesia’s first smart search engine called HukumOnline Advanced Search.

The search engine was launched recently in Jakarta and aims to aid legal professionals as well as the general public in looking for particular regulations or rules; a process that can take hours.

“With tons and tons of regulations and rules in the country, there is no one-stop online centre that compiles it all. When you look for employment regulations, you need to browse from one ministry to another, not to mention looking at related regulations that might be scattered around somewhere else.

“All we want to do is to ease this process that can take up to six hours, to basically seconds as our smart search engine will do everything for you,” Dattabot chief executive officer Regi Wahyu told Digital News Asia (DNA) in a phone interview.

The engine operates by carrying out contextual searches. According to Regi, this allows users to type in any layman’s term and the engine will collate all regulations, new and old, as well as related regulations immediately.

“The beauty of this smart engine is that the user can search using a popular common term, and it will still understand what the user wants. Users will also know whether the regulation is new, or been revised, or replaced, all in one search engine,” said HukumOnline business director Ahadi Bayu Tejo.

For HukumOnline this smart search capability is part of its effort to give users the best experience in looking for legal information.

The search engine is currently only accessible via web app and optimised for desktop viewing only due to the nature of the documents involved. No details are available yet in terms of when it will be optimised for mobile.

Users who want to access the legal database in HukumOnline Advanced Search need to register as members. There is no premium or paid service for using the search engine. However, to enjoy the sophisticated features available on hukumOnline, such as the legal database, legal briefs, law digests and monthly law reviews, members can upgrade to its premium service which costs between Rp1 million to Rp5 million (US$74.70 to US$373.50) a month.

Collaboration is the future

The partnership between HukumOnline and Dattabot makes perfect sense; the former has its legal database digitalised and optimised while the latter has expanded its reach to another vertical, hence climbing up a step in its efforts to digitise all data available in the country.

With its language processing and artificial intelligence technology, Dattabot has extracted information from around 30,000 legal documents. This information is then processed into a network-graph that can map 240,000 connections between these legal documents.

“Since it was established in 2000, HukumOnline has been collecting all the legal documents in the country and publishing them on their website. Now we want to take a step forward and see how we can leverage on this and disrupt the legal industry,” Regi explained.

The partnership took about a year to finalise and launch, with the longest and hardest step, according to Regi, being the production of its corpus legal.

Dattabot partnered with Ahmad Fikri Assegaf, who is a managing partner of local law firm Assegaf Hamzah & Partners as well as HukumOnline’s co-founder and member of its supervisory board in producing the corpus legal.

“The first step was to see what pain point we wanted to solve with this partnership. We found that many corporate legal teams were having a hard time in terms of the research needed to solve a case,” Regi added.

Regi said that there will be no immediate return of investment in the partnership, but they are hoping to make an impact on the industry, especially with many startups trying to figure out the complicated business regulations in the country.

“We are still working to improve the system all the time, adding more regulations, making the engine smarter in relating the documents. We are hoping to see the maturity level of the engine increase in the next two years,” he said.

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