Visualizing Legislation: Software Tools

A number of software applications and platforms are now available for creating visualizations (i.e., graphical depictions) of legislation. Here are some of them:

• Compendium — an argument mapping application, distributed free-of-charge — has been applied to legislation (see pages 129-132) by participants in the EU’s LEX-IS Project. (See the description in Loukis et al., Using Argument Visualization to Enhance e-Participation in the Legislation Formation Process, a paper delivered at ePart 2009: The First International Conference on eParticipation, 1-3 September 2009, Linz, Austria. (Click here for the full paper on SpringerLink.));
• Seadragon and Zoomorama have been used to create visualizations of bills, entire legislative codes, and titles of legislative codes (click here for 11 U.S.C.; click here for 17 U.S.C.; click here and here for 26 U.S.C.) by Michael James Bommarito II, Daniel Martin Katz, & Jon Zelner, all of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Center for Study of Complex Systems and Computational Legal Studies;
• DocBlocks and IBM Many Bills have been used to visualize topics in legislation, by the IBM Research Visual Communication Lab;
• CMap Tools have been used for the visualization of norms and related fields of law in legislation, by Felix Zimmermann of jurMeta and kjur.de. [Thanks to Mr. Zimmermann for this information, which was added 31 May 2010.]

If you know of other software tools used to create visualizations of legislation, please feel free to identify them in the comments.

Thanks to @fodden for suggesting this post.

Tags: Argument mapping software, Compendium, Computational Legal Studies, Daniel M, DocBlocks, ePart, ePart 2009, Euripidis Loukis, IBM Many Bills, IBM Research, IBM Research Visual Communication Lab, International Conference on eParticipation, Jonathan Zelner, Legal argument mapping, Legal knowledge representation, Legislative information systems, LEX-IS, Many Bills, Michael James Bommarito, Visualization of legal information, Visualization of legislative information