Harley on Semantic Lawyering

Brian Harley, an LLM student at Columbia Law School, is publishing a series of posts (see Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3) entitled Semantic Lawyering: How the Semantic Web Will Transform the Practice of Law, on the blog of Columbia Science and Technology Review.

[Click here for Part 4, added 21 April 2010.]

[Click here for Part 5, added 23 April 2010. HT @NicolasJondet]

The posts provide a useful and very basic summary of Semantic Web concepts, and their application to law, for those new to the topic.

For other recent introductions to legal Semantic Web technology, please see:

• Dr. Núria Casellas‘s VoxPopuLII post, Semantic Enhancement of Legal Information… Are We Up for the Challenge?; and
• Dr. Adam Wyner’s Law.com post, Legal Ontologies Spin a Semantic Web.

Click here for a list of law-related Linked Data projects.

HT @NicolasJondet.

Wyner on Legal XML

[NOTE: Updated on 29 December 2009 to correct the URL to the article.]

Dr. Adam Wyner has published The Language of Law on the Web, a discussion of XML as applied to legal documents. In this article, Dr. Wyner “introduce[s] the problem which XML addresses, [discusses] some of the broad concepts of XML, [furnishes] a short example, comment[s] on the relationship between XML and ontologies, and provide[s] some . . . sources of further information and tools.” This article is a useful, plain-language introduction to XML respecting legal documents, of particular interest to non-specialists.