The different phases of the terminological activity - from term identification to the compilation of term records - were all based on the use of a reference corpus made of law texts on Health and Safety at Work (HSW) issued by the four countries under examination (Italy, UK, France and Germany).
Besides ensuring that the information provided by the termbase is authoritative and reliable, this responds to one of the main objectives of the project, namely the comparison of different legal systems concerning HSW regulations. The choice not to ground terminology on manuals or specialised texts is motivated by the will to produce not only a terminological instrument for translators, but also a legal reference tool.

Our corpus represents therefore a systematic collection of law texts which can be useful independently of the rest of the knowledge base, i.e. the termbase and the concept diagrams.

Users can access the corpus in two distinct ways:

• by accessing individual full texts - within such texts, the terms which are also present in the termbase are highlighted and linked to the relevant records: this allows users to either simply read the texts, or to take advantage of the links between texts and the termbase in order to understand the meaning of terms or to learn more about specific concepts;
• by means of a concordancer - this allows users to display all the occurrences of a given word or expression in the whole corpus, or within restricted subsets determined by law type (national vs European) or issuing date. Besides enabling users to see all the contexts in which a term/concept is used, this function can be particularly useful for linguists, which are given an opportunity to study the "real" behaviour of a term in different contexts.