LegalRuleML: Proposed Charter for Technical Committee

A charter has been proposed for the LegalRuleML Technical Committee — convened by Professor Dr. Monica Palmirani of Università di Bologna Dipartimento di Scienze Giuridiche «Antonio Cicu» and CIRSFID — of the OASIS open standards organization, according to a 28 November 2011 post to the tc-announce@lists.oasis-open.org listserv.

According to the proposed charter, “[t]he goal of the LegalRuleML [Technical Committee] is to extend RuleML …with features specific to the formalization of norms, guidelines, and legal reasoning.”

For background information on the LegalRuleML project, please see Professor Dr. Palmirani’s recent paper on LegalRuleML.

For more information on the charter or the technical committee, please see the proposed charter.

HT @JamieXML.

Legal Informatics Papers at Cyberspace 11 Conference

Several papers on legal informatics — click here for abstracts — were presented at the Cyberspace 11 Conference, held 25-26 November 2011 in Brno, Czech Republic.

Legal informatics papers appear in the “Legal Informatics” panel of the conference, and also in several other parts of the conference. For full text of papers, please contact the authors.

U.S. Bankruptcy Code in ePUB and Kindle Formats

Scott Cromar of the University of Illinois College of Law has created free-of-charge versions of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code in ePUB and Kindle e-book formats.

These e-books are published on the site of the Credit Slips blog.

These publications are the latest in a series of free e-book publications of U.S. primary legal materials in the open ePUB format. These publications include CALI’s Free Law Reporter and the joint Legal Information Institute-CALI Federal Rules E-Books.

HT Prof. Robert Lawless.

Katz and Bommarito to Teach Network Analysis and Law Tutorial @ Jurix 2011

A tutorial on “Network Analysis and Law”, taught by Professor Dr. Daniel Martin Katz of Michigan State University College of Law and Michael J. Bommarito II of Computational Legal Studies, will be held 13 December 2011 in Vienna, Austria, at JURIX 2011: The 24th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems.

Here are the goals of the tutorial:

• To introduce a variety of concepts from complex systems and network science
• To outline potential applications of network science in legal studies and positive legal theory
• To highlight possible uses of network metadata to enrich legal informatics sub-fields such as information retrieval
• To examine the application of various network based epidemiological / diffusion models
• To introduce participants to various theoretical and empirical network science software platforms

For more information, please see the announcement.

HT @computational.

New Discussion: Should Legal Informatics Technologies Be Open Source?

A new discussion of the question: Should Legal Informatics Technologies Be Open Source? is currently underway. The conversation was begun by Grant Vergottini of Xcential Group, with a new post at the Legix.info blog entitled To Go Open Source or Not? In that post, Mr. Vergottini poses two questions:

1. Which data models should be used in legal informatics systems?
2. Which aspects of these models should be open source?

Ari Hershowitz of Tabulaw has responded with his new post at the Tabulaw blog, entitled Legislative Model: How Much to Open Source?

This topic has been much discussed in the past in the free-access-to-law community. On this blog, I’ve discussed several aspects of this topic. What are your views on this topic today?

New on VoxPopuLII: Fernández-Barrera on Legal Prosumers: How Can Government Leverage User-Generated Content?

Dr. Meritxell Fernández-Barrera of Cersa (Centre d’Études et de Recherches de Sciences Administratives et Politiques)- CNRS has posted Legal Prosumers: How Can Government Leverage User-Generated Content?, on the VoxPopuLII blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School.

In this post, Dr. Fernández-Barrera describes new, innovative methods of analyzing very large quantities of law-related user-generated content.

In two recent studies described in the post, Dr. Fernández-Barrera and colleagues analyzed thousands of consumer law queries and complaints submitted by citizens to consumer protection agencies in Spain and Italy. Using a combination of automated text extraction techniques and expert input from lawyers, the researchers mapped the citizens’ lay terminology to formal legal terms. The technical legal language was expressed in legal ontologies — the Mediation Core Ontology and the Consumer Mediation Ontology — or in statutes: the Italian Consumer Code. The results of this research give us new insights about citizens’ knowledge of consumer law, and about the relationships between formal legal language and the way law is expressed in lay language.

Dr. Fernández-Barrera then describes her recent research into methods for making legal semantic analysis of user-generated content scalable. In studies of citizens’ online queries about consumer law and noise-nuisance complaints, she and her colleagues found that by focusing on language patterns involving emotions, events, and “stereotypical situations appearing in the description of legal cases by citizens,” automated techniques alone could successfully analyze very large quantities of user-generated content. Dr. Fernández-Barrera concludes by reflecting on the ethical dimensions of governments’ use of citizen comments in law- and policy making.

This post should be of interest to policy makers, the e-government and Government 2.0 communities, the Web 2.0 community, those who study legal language, and developers of legal information systems.

New Blog on Legal Informatics: Grant Vergottini: Legix.info: Applying Legal Informatics Technologies

Grant Vergottini of Xcential Group has launched a new blog entitled Legix.info: Applying Legal Informatics Technologies.

Mr. Vergottini writes that the purpose of the blog is to explore “how Legal Informatics technologies can be applied to create a world-wide semantic web for law.” He writes that his posts will address both “philosophical and technical” issues respecting legal informatics.

According to the first post, the blog will address such issues as “open standards,” Semantic Web technologies for law, and “how to model legislation in XML.”

Mr. Vergottini writes that the his next post will address the question: “How can we heed the call for better open source data without hindering the for-profit motive that will foster an industry?” He also invites readers to suggest topics for future posts.

In addition, Mr. Vergottini has recently introduced two innovative legal information technologies:

• At his Legix.info Website, he has developed a new legal identifier system based on the URN:LEX standard;
• Also at Legix.info, Mr. Vergottini has published SLIM (Simplified Legislative Information Model), an XML model for legislation, “under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license” (click here for documentation on SLIM, entitled Understanding SLIM (in PDF), and click here for the SLIM schema (in .xsd format)).

HT Ari Hershowitz’s tweet and Google + post.

Bommarito on 21st Century Legal Informatics

Michael J. Bommarito II of Computational Legal Studies has begun a new series of posts entitled 21st Century Legal Informatics.

The initial post in the series presents Mr. Bommarito’s visions of the role of technology in law practice in the 20th, 21st, and 22nd centuries. He views the current century as a transitional period between a library-based model of legal research, practice, and publishing, and a future era in which artificial intelligence applications perform most functions of lawyers.

Mr. Bommarito plans to demonstrate his conception of the 21st century as transitional phase in legal informatics, through upcoming posts on “e-Discovery, search, and legal rule exploration.”

Kirchberger: The ‘I’ in Legal Information Retrieval

Christine Kirchberger, Esq., LL.M., M.L.I.T., junior lecturer and doctoral candidate at Stockholm University Department of Law‘s Swedish Law and Informatics Research Institute (IRI), has posted The ‘I’ in Legal Information Retrieval, published recently in Vem reglerar informationssamhället? Nordisk årsbok i rättsinformatik 2006 – 2008, Stanley Greenstein, ed., Jure, 2010.

Here is the abstract:

The term legal information retrieval is a rather commonly used expression. While the extent of legal and the efficiency of retrieval might be discussed, the voices on the reach of information are not very loud. The legal community, as a group rather conservative, seems to rely on the truth, persistence and resistance of the doctrine of legal sources despite the fact that these principles do not have a commonly accepted substance and every lawyer might have their own interpretation of the implementation of these guiding principles. The doctrine of legal sources is nevertheless the leading star for legal method and has not lost its power despite this possible inconsistency in its practical operation.

The doctrine is, however, only the first step when answering the question what is information from a legal perspective. In trying to find possible paths of solution or discussion, the article tries to pinpoint three aspects of the concept of information.

HT @lsolum.

Wyner and Peters On Rule Extraction from Regulations

Dr. Adam Wyner of the University of Liverpool Department of Computer Science, and Dr. Wim Peters of the University of Sheffield Department of Computer Science, have posted their paper entitled On Rule Extraction from Regulations, to be presented at JURIX 2011: The 24th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, 14-16 December 2011, in Vienna, Austria.

Here is the abstract:

Rules in regulations such as found in the US Federal Code of Regulations can be expressed using conditional and deontic rules. Identifying and extracting such rules from the language of the source material would be useful for automating rulebook management and translating into an executable logic. The paper presents a linguistically-oriented, rule-based approach, which is in contrast to a machine learning approach. It outlines use cases, discusses the source materials, reviews the methodology, then provides initial results and future steps.

The empirical component of the study involves application of the method and model to text from 21 Code of Federal Regulations part 610, section 40 (21 C.F.R. 610.40).