Jaquith: Version 0.6 of The State Decoded released

Waldo Jaquith has released version 0.6 of The State Decoded, his open legal data and e-participation platform for U.S. states, as explained in his new post entitled Version 0.6 Released at The State Decoded blog.

Here is an excerpt from the post:

Version 0.6 of The State Decoded is now available on GitHub. This release is a really exciting one—it establishes a public API for State Decoded sites and creates a standard XML format for importing laws! This is an important release of The State Decoded, one that stands to significant increase the accessibility of the project to developers, both within the software and without. A total of 23 issues were resolved, nearly all of which are towards those two goals. [...]

For more details, please see the complete post.

HT @waldojaquith

Ruby Wrapper for GovTrack API

Noah Litvin announced last week that he has written “an unofficial Ruby wrapper for the GovTrack API“.

GovTrack is Dr. Joshua Tauberer‘s free and open legislative data and e-participation service for U.S. federal legislation.

The readme for the Ruby wrapper includes several examples.

Click here for the GovTrack API.

HT @noahlitvin and @govtrack.

An API for European Union Legislation, in JSON

An application programming interface (API) for European Union legislation, in JSON format, has been made available by Buhl Rasmussen.

According to the service’s “Data” page, the legislative data available through the API come from several sources; most of the data come from the official EU databases EUR-Lex, PreLex, or OEIL.

The API key is available here.

For more information, please see the service’s “Documentation” page.

HT @elaragon and @JeniT.

Jaquith on The State Decoded: Parsing Statutory Histories and Turning Laws Inside Out

Waldo Jaquith of The State Decoded has published two posts on the PBS / Knight Foundation MediaShift / IdeaLab blog:

• How to Decode State Law Histories
• The State Decoded Turns Laws Inside Out

In How to Decode State Law Histories, Mr. Jaquith describes a parser that he is developing for The State Decoded, his state-level open legislative data platform, that would render in plain language the complex and arcane histories of amendments, that appear in the notes of many sections of statutory codes. [Click here for background on The State Decoded.] He writes that he is developing:

a parser for the State Decoded for these history sections, so that rather than displaying this cryptic content, instead the material will be provided in plain English. By storing this data atomically, it’ll be possible to generate a listing of all laws that were amended in a given year, all laws amended by a given portion of the Acts of the General Assembly, or find laws similar to a given law based on their shared history of being amended within the same portion of the Acts. I’m optimistic that it’ll be possible to connect many state codes’ history records back to individual pieces of legislation, rather than just the legislature’s changelog, which opens up a potential wealth of information. (This can already be seen on Virginia Decoded for all changes from 2006 onward, such as in the “Amendment Attempts” listing on § 2.2-3705.1.)

In The State Decoded Turns Laws Inside Out, Mr. Jaquith describes two methods by which The State Decoded seeks to improve public access to state laws.

The first is by “reducing laws to their smallest possible units, indexing them via every possible metric.” The second is by “exposing all of those internal structures” through application programming interfaces (APIs). Mr Jaquith describes the possible benefits of releasing legislative data through APIs as follows:

There are people much smarter than I who will grasp the fascinating applications and analyses that can be created with these data. Perhaps they’ll find that legislators in different political parties tend to pass bills that affect distinctly different titles of the code. Or that the SMOG ranking of amendments to the code have gradually been increasing. Maybe that legislation amending a law tends to follow a spike in scholarly citations of that law. Who knows?

Mr. Jaquith adds:

The API for Virginia [Decoded] is in alpha testing now. If you’re interested in putting it to work, send an e-mail saying so to join the alpha test.

Sheridan on Putting APIs First: legislation.gov.uk

John L. Sheridan of The National Archives (UK) has posted Putting APIs first: legislation.gov.uk, on the the Government Digital Service site.

Here is an excerpt from the post:

With legislation.gov.uk we aimed to open-up access to the government’s legislation database, by creating an API first. The legislation.gov.uk API allows anyone to access the data we hold in the database, or to use the services we have built, such as the search or to dynamically create PDF documents from the data. We wanted to show that government could create a high-quality, technically sophisticated API, following the principles of both REST and Linked Data. We also wanted our API to be fully open, with no restrictions on use, and no need to register before using it.

We developed the API and then built the legislation.gov.uk website on top of it. The API isn’t a bolt-on or additional feature, it is the beating heart of the service.

For more information, please see the complete post.

HT @JeniT.

Malmgren on Legal Information in the Cloud: A Basis for New Services

Staffan Malmgren of the Swedish Courts Administration and the free access to law service of Sweden, lagen.nu, has posted slides from his presentation entitled Legal Information in the Cloud: A Basis for New Services [Rättsinformation i molnet – en grund för nya tjänster?], given 15 November 2011, at Juridiska tjänster via webben - drivkrafter och överväganden, in Stockholm, Sweden.

Here is the abstract:

The presentation outlines the architecture of the official Swedish legal information system and explains choices made in its construction. As proponents of Open data, we want to to enable the construction of a large variety of legal information services using the official information system. We specify a number of features of an information system, and explains how each of these enables a new class of service upon the data.

These features are: Clear rules for reuse, facilities for bulk downloading of data, stable and predictable identifiers for documents and other entities in the system, retrieval of individual documents, standardized document formats, update/notification mechanisms for when data is changed, basic metadata about documents and entities, relational metadata that connect documents and entities, and finally API’s for creating result list of documents and entities matching a set of criteria (including free text search of document text).

These features are ranked in order of how essential they are to implement, and for each new feature we explain the new class of services that the feature enable. E.g. stable and predictable identifiers allow document retrieval by identity, but also value-added information from third parties (e.g. legal commentary for a statute) when everyone agrees on the identifier for a particular information resource.

At the far end, these features enable the construction of legal information services that do not by themselves store any data or implement e.g. free text search or relevance ranking. Data can be retrieved on demand by other services, enabling a legal information cloud service.

For more information, please contact Mr. Malmgren.

Thanks to Mr. Malmgren for sending the abstract.

New Law-Related APIs from Code for America

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:

• congress, “a Ruby wrapper for” Sunlight Labs‘ Real-Time Congress API;
• councilmatic, an API for “Philadelphia City Council Legislative Information“; and
• fcc_reboot, “[a] Ruby wrapper for the FCC Reboot APIs“.

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.

Federal Register API Now Available

An application programming interface (API) is now available for Federal Register data from FederalRegister.gov (also known as Federal Register 2.0), according to a 1 August 2011 post by Michael White of the Office of the Federal Register, on the OFR Blog.

According to the post, the API is RESTful, and provides access to metadata and full text data in JSON format. Via the API, data are accessible by agency, by document number, or by advanced search query.

A Ruby version of the API client is also available as a Ruby gem, on GitHub and RubyGems.

Some comments about the API are available at Hacker News.

For more information, please see the announcement.

HT @silona.