The legal informatics conference calendar has now been updated.
The calendar lists primarily scholarly conferences that focus on legal information systems, or that are known to welcome papers on legal information systems.
Click here for a list of events just added to the calendar.
If you know of events or other information that should be on the calendar but are not; or if you spot errors in the calendar, I’d be grateful if you would please share that information in the comments to this post.
At least three law-related application programming interfaces (APIs) were released this summer by Code for America.
According to a recent post by Dan Melton on the Code for America site, development of these APIs was funded in whole or in part by a Google Summer of Code grant.
The new law-related Code for America APIs (that I’ve been able to identify) are:
All of the Code for America APIs released this summer are available on GitHub.
If you know of other law-related APIs released recently by Code for America, please feel free to identify them in the comments.
HT Dan Melton.
Robb Shecter, J.D., creator of OregonLaws.org and WebLaws.org, has released Quisitive, a new iPhone/iPad app that enables searches for U.S. trademarks, as well as research into trade names, branding, and U.S. trademark and copyright law.
According to the Quisitive press materials, Quisitive searches current “data from the United States Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO) TESS & TARR databases.”
Future plans for the app include adding commentary “from branding & intellectual property experts,” as well as “name screening against several common law data sources.”
For more information, please see the Quisitive Web site.
The Legal Informatics Conference Calendar and the Legal Information Systems and Legal Informatics Resources Website have moved. Their new URLs are:
Legal Informatics Conference Calendar: http://www.personal.psu.edu/rcr5122/ConferencesCalendar.html;
Legal Information Systems and Legal Informatics Resources: http://www.personal.psu.edu/rcr5122/LegalInformationSystemsBibliography.htm.
Access has been restored to the legal informatics conference calendar and the Legal Information Systems and Legal Informatics Resources Website. We apologize for the inconvenience.
Dr. Núria Casellas of the Legal Information Institute has published Legal Ontology Engineering: Methodologies, Modelling Trends, and the Ontology of Professional Judicial Knowledge (Springer, 2011) (Law, Governance and Technology Series ; Vol. 3). Here is the publisher’s description:
Enabling information interoperability, fostering legal knowledge usability and reuse, enhancing legal information search, in short, formalizing the complexity of legal knowledge to enhance legal knowledge management are challenging tasks, for which different solutions and lines of research have been proposed.
During the last decade, research and applications based on the use of legal ontologies as a technique to represent legal knowledge has raised a very interesting debate about their capacity and limitations to represent conceptual structures in the legal domain. Making conceptual legal knowledge explicit would support the development of a web of legal knowledge, improve communication, create trust and enable and support open data, e-government and e-democracy activities. Moreover, this explicit knowledge is also relevant to the formalization of software agents and the shaping of virtual institutions and multi-agent systems or environments.
This book explores the use of ontologism in legal knowledge representation for semantically-enhanced legal knowledge systems or web-based applications. In it, current methodologies, tools and languages used for ontology development are revised, and the book includes an exhaustive revision of existing ontologies in the legal domain. The development of the Ontology of Professional Judicial Knowledge (OPJK) is presented as a case study.
The Legal Informatics Conference Calendar, and our blog’s sister Website — “Legal Information Systems and Legal Informatics Resources” — are temporarily unavailable. We hope to restore access shortly. We apologize for any inconvenience.
For a spreadsheet version of the Legal Informatics Conference Calendar, click here for a version in Excel format (.xls).
Grant Vergottini of Xcential Group has released an unofficial RESTful Application Programming Interface (API) for California legislation, according to a post by Ari Hershowitz of Tabulaw.
Specifications for the API are available here and here.
The publication of the specifications for Tthis API is the first product of Mr. Hershowitz’s calaw project and its associated California Law Hackathon, which is tentatively scheduled for 3-4 September 2011.
Click here for more information about the California Law Hackathon and the calaw project.
HT @arihersh.
