Legal Informatics Proposals for TransparencyCamp 2013

Some legal informatics proposals have been submitted for TransparencyCamp 2013, to be held 4-5 May 2013, in Washington, DC, USA:

• Ben Balter: Open Sourcing Government
• Hudson Hollister: Creating a Legislative Agenda for Open Data
• Tom MacWright: The Story of the DC Code
• James McKinney: Open Government Data Standards
• David Moore: OpenGovernment.org : For state and city government engagement
• Stephen Schultze: PACER, RECAP, OpenPACER.org

The Twitter hashtag for TransparencyCamp 2013 appears to be #tcamp13

Akoma Ntoso and Linked Data at the Italian Senate

Akoma Ntoso’s Website has posted Akoma Ntoso adopted by the Italian Senate.

Here is an excerpt:

Starting from 23 February 2013, all the bills published on the Italian Senate website are available, other than in the usual HTML, PDF, and ePub formats, also in XML, using an Akoma Ntoso compliant scheme.

The Italian Senate, in the wake of the European Parliament, has also joined the growing number of parliaments supporting Akoma Ntoso as common to support more effective management of information and long-term preservation of formal documentation.

Akoma Ntoso is the result of the efforts of the Africa i-Parliaments Action Plan to realize a common standard for the interchange of legal documents among institutions and countries. Building on the opportunities offered by open standards, it aims at supporting the development of high-value parliamentary and legislative information services. [...]

In addition, the Italian Senate has made available a SPARQL endpoint for legislative Linked Data.

HT @cottinstef and @adreagui

Vergottini: Automating Legal References in Legislation

Grant Vergottini of Xcential Group has posted Automating Legal References in Legislation,” at Legix.info.

This is a quite detailed post, with examples, describing a new legal URI standard or pattern, based on URN LEX and Akoma Ntoso References.

I believe Akoma Ntoso References is being developed by the OASIS LegalDocumentML Technical Committee.

For more details, please see Grant’s complete post.

HT @grantcv1

Van Opijnen on The European Legal Semantic Web

Marc van Opijnen of the The Netherlands Council for the Judiciary (Raad Voor de Rechtspraak) has posted the full text of his paper entitled The European Legal Semantic Web: Completed Building Blocks and Future Work, given last week at Journées européennes d’informatique 2012 = European Legal e-Access Conference.

Here is the abstract:

If constructed properly the European legal semantic web will improve access to legal information, stimulate innovative applications and legal services, and reinforce judicial and legal cooperation within Europe.

In this paper we will discuss why we still we do not have one-click answers on very basic legal questions, what building blocks are already in place and what still has to be done to have the European Legal Semantic Web really functioning.

We will start with some illustrations from legal practice to demonstrate the blessings of the semantic web, and the definition of some terminology (§ 1). Next, we will review the state of play regarding the most important building blocks for identifying legal sources (§ 2). In § 3 we will summarize the most necessary steps that have to be taken in the near future, both at European and national level, to make substantial headway. One of these steps might be the development of a European Legal Doctrine Identifier.

Some concluding remarks are made in § 4.

Among the resources discussed in the paper are:

• European case law identifier (ECLI)
• European legislation identifier (ELI)
• European legal doctrine identifier (ELDI)
• EUR-Lex
• CELEX

November 26 Call for Papers Deadline: Legal Resources from Text to Rules: Jurix Workshop

A call for papers — with submission deadline of 26 November 2012 — has been issued for the Jurix 2012 workshop entitled Legal Resources from Text to Rules, to be held 20 December 2012 in Amsterdam.

The workshop is being held in conjunction with JURIX 2012: International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, being held 17-20 December 2012 at Leibniz Center for Law, University of Amsterdam.

Here are details of the workshop:

The time is ripe for investigating the connections between the representation of legal XML texts and their formalization as legal rules.

For years these two communities have pursued their goals separately, but now emerging XML-based standards oriented both to legal documents (Akoma Ntoso, CEN Metalex, national XML standards, etc.) and to legal rules (LKIF, RuleML, RIF, SWRL, LegalRuleML, etc.) justify the possibility to combine techniques and foster their concrete application in the society (compliance, eGov services, legislative drafting, policy making applications, digital legal libraries, etc.).

This workshop aims to examine the relationship between legal computable ontologies as bridges from legal concepts and their legal texts and legal rules (predicates). Hybrid platform where ontologies are used to support legal reasoning and to create bidirectional dialogues with legal knowledge bases are part within the workshop scope.

Questions we will try to address:

• Are the statuses of legal XML standards fixed? What are the next steps?
• Are legal rules autonomous or they need to link their evidences to the text for support?
• Are multiple interpretations of a legal text possible without affecting its representations as legal XML documents?
• What are the roles of the legal ontologies and of semantic web (especially Linked Data) technologies in this scenario?

Proponents: Monica Palmirani, Fabio Vitali, Enrico Francesconi, Tom van Engers, Radboud Winkels

Selected papers will be published in the AICOL IV volume by the end of 2013, after a double peer-review process.

For more information, please see the call for papers.

HT Professor Palmirani

Updated Version of LegalRuleML Tutorial Released

An updated version of a tutorial about LegalRuleML — an extension of the RuleML markup language, applied to legal rules — has been posted by the OASIS LegalRuleML Technical Committee.

For more information on the work of the committee, please see their Website and their email archive.

HT Professor Dr. Monica Palmirani

Bennett on URN:LEX Codes for U.S. Legal Materials in Multilingual Zotero

Professor Frank Bennett of Nagoya University Graduate School of Law has posted Proposed urn:lex codes for US materials in MLZ, at CitationStylist.

Here is a summary of the post:

The [Multilingual Zotero (MLZ)] styles rely on a urn:lex-like scheme for specifying the jurisdiction of primary legal materials. We will need to have at least a minimal set of jurisdction codes in place for the styles to be functional. The scheme to be used for this purpose is the subject of this post.

URN:LEX is an international standard for legal identifiers, in the form of Uniform Resource Names (URNs).

Multilingual Zotero is an unofficial “fork” of the Zotero open source citation management software.

Professor Bennett’s post includes examples.

For more information, please see the complete post.

HT @fgbjr.

Shecter: Legal Document Metadata in HTML5 Microdata?

Robb Shecter, Esq., creator of OregonLaws.org and WebLaws.org, has given me permission to repost the following. Please feel free to respond in the comments to this post or by contacting Robb directly.

Robb writes:

The “new way forward” on the web for metadata looks destined to be html5 + microdata based on a schema.org vocabulary. CreativeWork looks like the best candidate for this:

http://schema.org/CreativeWork

Anyone know about a project doing this? I’m about to begin experimenting with it.

Bruce: How Well Does Current Legislative Identifier Practice Measure Up?

Tom Bruce of the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School (LII) has posted Identifiers, Part 3: How Well Does Current Practice Measure Up?, on LII’s new legislative metadata blog, Making Metasausage.

In this post, Tom surveys legislative identifier systems currently in use. He recommends the use of URIs for legislative identifiers, rather than URLs or URNs.

He cites favorably the URI-based identifier system that John Sheridan and Dr. Jeni Tennison developed for the Legislation.gov.uk system. Tom praises Sheridan’s (here) and Tennison’s (here and here) writings on legislative URIs and Linked Data.

Tom also praises the URI system implemented by Dr. Rinke Hoekstra in the Leibniz Center for Law‘s Metalex Document Server for facilitating point-in-time as well as point-in-process identification of legislation.

Tom concludes by making a series of recommendations for a legislative identifier system:

• All legislative resources should have identifiers.
• A “gold standard” legislative identifier system should be developed and implemented. The identifiers created under this “gold standard” system should:
• be “unambiguous”;
• be “designed to resist tampering”;
• be “clear as to the separation of titling, dating, and identification functions”; and
• incorporate “carefully designed relationships among identifiers to allow the retention of well-understood legacy monikers for foreground use, while making use of a well-structured ‘gold standard’ from the beginning.”
• A legislative identifier system ought to “retain useful semantics in identifiers as a way of increasing access and reducing errors.”
• A legislative identifier system should “maintain granularity [...] with a distinction between identifiers and labels. Identifiers should be assigned at the whole-document level” while “labels may be assigned to subdocuments.”
• A legislative identifier system should be implemented with a “layered, incremental approach.”
• A URI-based legislative identifier system should “create APIs for the underlying data.”
• A legislative identifier system should enable “point-in-time as well as point-in-process identification.”

For more information, please see the complete post.

Click here for Tom’s two earlier posts in this series on legislative identifiers.

Posts and Resources About International Legislation Unhackathon

Here are links to posts and other resources (that I’ve been able to identify) about the International Legislation Unhackathon, held 19 May 2012. (If you know of other posts or resources about the event, please tell us about them in the comments):

• Archived tweets from the event, in .csv format (see other tweets about the event at hashtag #legalhacks)
• U.S. state legislation marked up during the event (click on a shaded state to see legislation from that state)
• National legislation marked up during the event (click on a shaded country to see legislation from that country)
• An overview of the event, and comments contributed during the event, available on the event’s Wiki
• Grant Vergottini’s summary post about the event, entitled Unhackathon Wrapup
• Ari Hershowitz’s summary post about the event, entitled International Legislative Unhackathon and G+ Hangout
• Videos shown during the event
• Grant Vergottini’s new HTML-based XML legislation editor, used during the event
• Grant Vergottini’s posts about the event (written before the event)
• Ari Hershowitz’s posts about the event (written before the event: here and here)
• Alex Hendler’s post looking forward to the event, entitled How to Eat Legislative Sausage
• Background information about the event

Click here for upcoming legal hacking events.

Find news about upcoming legal hacking events at hashtags #legalhack and #legalhacks.

Click here for posts and resources about other legal hacking events held recently.