Legislation.gov.uk Wins UK Public Sector Digital Award

Legislation.gov.uk, the UK’s official free and open online legislative service, has won the UK Public Sector Digital Award for “Best example of ICT-enabled innovation and enterprise,” according to a 20 January 2012 announcement on The National Archives Website.

The announcement describes Legislation.gov.uk as follows:

Legislation.gov.uk is a world first – the first linked data statute book. This means that people can re-use legislation data in other applications or link it to other databases. This has led to The National Archives developing a new, transferable business model for updating government databases.

For more information about Legislation.gov.uk, please see John Sheridan’s post, “Legislation.gov.uk,” at VoxPopuLII.

Click here for Paul Appleby’s recent post about new automatic updating technology being added to Legislation.gov.uk.

Click here for other resources on Linked Data and law.

February 2 Webinar: Gastil on Deliberative Innovations in India, Brazil, Canada, and the United States

Professor Dr. John Gastil of the Pennsylvania State University Department of Communication Arts and Sciences will give a presentation and Webinar entitled Four Glimpses of Democracy’s Future: Deliberative Innovations in India, Brazil, Canada, and the United States, 2 February 2012, at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.

Click here to register for the free Webinar.

Here is the abstract of the presentation:

While more nations across the globe move toward democratic elections, countries with long histories of electoral democracy now strive to make their systems more deliberative. We welcome you to learn about four of the boldest and most influential innovations in deliberative democracy, each of which finds ways of bringing citizens’ voices more directly into public policy debates by connecting small face-to-face deliberation with larger mass political events. Discover democracy’s widening reach, strengthening citizens’ participation in the public democratic system.

The presentation is hosted by the Centre for Public Involvement.

The presentation is being offered as part of the University of Alberta’s International Week, on the theme of Living Democracy: Citizen Power in a Digital Age.

Yu et al. on Mining Information from Patent Laws and Regulations across Multiple Domains

Hang Yu and Professor Jay Kesan of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Siddharth Taduri, Dr. Gloria Lau, and Professor Dr. Kincho H. Law of the Stanford University Engineering Informatics Group, have published Mining Information across Multiple Domains: A Case Study of Application to Patent Laws and Regulations in Biotechnology, Government Information Quarterly, 29 (supplement 1) (2012), S11-S21. Here is the abstract:

In this paper, we present a framework that can process a user query for retrieval of information from documents of different properties across multiple domains, with specific application to patent laws and regulations. The framework has three basic components. The first component is ontology mapping and generation. What happens is that the keywords entered by users are mapped into a subset of relevant keywords. This step is performed by looking up those words in an ontology database. The second component is the joint and cross search in various document domains; in our case, they are patents and scientific publications. The last component is to modify the search results by applying user feedback statistics. The results of feedback will be saved as metadata for future uses.

A case example is given to demonstrate how results from multiple domain searches can be combined using ontology and cross referencing. We use an example of well-known biotechnology patents on erythropoietin (EPO) and give detailed analysis on each document domain with this keyword. Relationships between each domain are demonstrated.

A user feedback mechanism is also discussed in this paper. The ability to take user feedback into the framework is important. There is no doubt that domain knowledge from expert or experienced users could be a very good compliment to the proposed system. Both direct and indirect user feedbacks are discussed.

Rens on a Feedback Loop for Law

Andrew Rens, LL.M., of Duke Law School has posted A Feedback Loop for Law: Version 1.0, at the African Legal Information Institute Blog.

Here is an extract from the post:

There is an opportunity to build a system that enables ordinary citizens to use increasingly available information technologies to comment on, critique laws, report problems in practice and suggest amendments. This is the opportunity that African Legal Information Institute is working on. Kerry [Anderson] recently wrote about an exciting new pilot funded by the Shuttleworth Foundation. The objective is to use software to enable people to comment on free legal information. Think of it as a system for making bug reports and feature requests for statutes and case law. The people reponsible for making and administering the law will still have the power and responsibility to do so, but they will have better information.

For more information, please see the complete post.

Kahana on Computational Law Applications and the Unauthorized Practice of Law

Eran Kahana, Esq., of CodeX: The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics, and DataCard Corporation has posted Computational Law Applications and the Unauthorized Practice of Law, at The CodeX Blog.

In this post, Mr. Kahana discusses the potential obstacles that unauthorized practice of law (UPL) statutes raise to the development of computational law artificial intelligence (CLAI) technologies. He then recommends an approach to revising UPL statutes so that they do not inhibit the development of CLAI technologies.

HT @stephkimbro.

Schuman on the U.S. House of Representatives’ Transparency Portal

Daniel Schuman of The Sunlight Foundation has posted House Launches Transparency Portal, on The Sunlight Foundation Blog.

Mr. Schuman’s post describes http://docs.house.gov/ — also called “Bills This Week” and “Bills to Be Considered on the House Floor” — which provides free public access to XML versions of “all House bills, amendments, resolutions for floor consideration, and conference reports … as well as information on floor proceedings and more.”

The post evaluates the House site in light of the House leadership’s stated transparency goals, and describes additional content and services planned for the site.

Click here for the XML metadata used by the House.

For more information, please see the complete post.

Call for Session Proposals: lawTechCamp 2012

A call for session proposals has been issued for lawTechCamp 2012 unconference, to be held 12 May 2012 at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Topics — which “should bridge technology and law in some way” — include “technology that could help in the practice of law” and “knowledge management for solo lawyers.”

The conference Website describes lawTechCamp 2012 in the following way:

lawTechCamp is a BarCamp-style community UnConference for new media and technology enthusiasts and legal professionals including bloggers, twitters, legal-technology lawyers, social networkers, and anyone curious about new media and the law.  

lawTechCamp is not just for lawyers.  If you are interested in the intersection of law and technology, such as legal issues facing startups, access to justice issues, or someone just interested in technology or law, then please join us – and bring a friend or colleague.

This event is casual, with active participation between the audience and the workshop presenters and event-attendees. Attendance is free, but registration is required.

The conference is co-sponsored by The Centre for Innovation Law and Policy at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law.

According to the conference co-organizer Monica Goyal:

We are looking for speakers and attendees [...]. It is meant to be an unconference, and we hope to do it for free again this year. And we are looking for other sponsors. [...] I would love to see this grow to other states. The sharing of ideas and community building, I believe are antecedents to technology creation.

Click here for registration information.

For more information, please see the call for session proposals.

HT Monica Goyal.

Call for Participation: First Shared Task on Dependency Parsing of Legal Texts, SPLeT 2012

A call for participation — with registration deadline of 30 January 2012 — has been issued for the First Shared Task on Dependency Parsing of Legal Texts, part of SPLeT 2012: The “Semantic Processing of Legal Texts” Workshop, to be held 27 May 2012, in Istanbul, Turkey. (SPLeT 2012 is being held in conjunction with LREC-2012: The Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation.)

According to the call:

[T]he goal of the shared task at SPLeT 2012 is to provide common and consistent task definitions and evaluation criteria for dependency parsing of legal texts in order to identify specific challenges posed by the analysis of this type of texts, to obtain a clearer idea of the current state-of-the-art, and to develop and share multilingual domain specific resources.

The languages dealt with will be English and Italian. Participants are expected to submit parsing results for at least one of the two languages involved, but they are strongly encouraged to submit results for both languages.

The task will be organized into two subtasks:

• a basic subtask (mandatory) focusing on dependency parsing of legal texts, aimed at testing the performance of general parsing systems on legal texts;
• a more challenging subtask (optional) focusing on the adaptation of general purpose dependency parsers to the legal domain, aimed at investigating methods and techniques for automatically extracting knowledge from large unlabelled target domain corpora to improve the performance of general parsing systems on legal texts.

For all deadlines, and for other information, please see the call for participation.

HT Dr. Giulia Venturi.

Legal Services Corporation Technology Initiative Grants Conference

LSC TIG 2012: The Legal Services Corporation Technology Initiative Grants Conference, is being held 11-13 January 2012 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA.

The conference features presentations about innovative applications of technology to improve access to justice.

Click here for the complete conference program.

The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #lsctig.

Davidow et al. on OpenCourt and Transparency in the Court

John Davidow of WBUR, and colleagues, gave a presentation entitled OpenCourt: Transparency in the Court, on 29 November 2011, at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. Click here for video and audio of the presentation.

Here is the abstract of the presentation:

With the support of a Knight News Challenge grant OpenCourt streams and archives live daily coverage of court sessions. The project seeks to make courts more accessible to the public through technology while respecting legitimate concerns about privacy. John Davidow (Executive Producer), Joe Spurr (Director), and Val Wang (Producer) join the Berkman Center community to talk about this fascinating project.