Abstract
Documentation and easy accessibility of data on matters relating to national and ethnic minorities is becoming increasingly significant. Even over the last couple of years, legal standardisation in Europe, the enlargement of the European Union and the establishment of international instruments such as the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities and the European Charter for Regional and Mi-nority Languages of the Council of Europe have contributed to a greater awareness of minority issues. However, the rapid growth of the Web makes it increasingly difficult to locate, organize, and integrate the available information. We herein present the re-search project MIRIS which for the very first time offers a web portal to all relevant information on minorities of all member states of the Council of Europe. MIRIS con-tains both legal as well as non-legal documents and provides a coherent presentation with powerful query capabilities including an ontology-driven search