Ossowski (ed.): Agreement Technologies

Springer has published an article collection entitled Agreement Technologies (2013), edited by Professor Dr. Sascha Ossowski of Universidad Rey Juan Carlos.

The book is volume 8 in the the Law, Governance and Technology Series.

Here are excerpts from the preface:

This book describes the state of the art in the emerging field of Agreement Technologies (AT). AT refer to computer systems in which autonomous software agents negotiate with one another, typically on behalf of humans, in order to come to mutually acceptable agreements. [...]

The book was produced in the framework of [the EU-funded] COST Action IC0801 on Agreement Technologies.

This book [...] is subdivided into seven parts.

• Part I is dedicated to foundational issues of Agreement Technologies, examining the notion of agreement and agreement processes from different perspectives. [...]
• Part II outlines the relevance of novel approaches to Semantics and ontological alignments in distributed settings.
• Part III gives an overview of approaches for modelling norms and normative systems, the simulation of their dynamics, and their
  impact on the other key areas of Agreement Technologies.
• Part IV discusses how to design computational organisations, how to reason about them, and how organisational models can be evolved.
• Part V gives an overview of current approaches to argumentation and negotiation, and how they can be used to inform human reasoning, as well as to assist machine reasoning.
• Part VI describes different models and mechanisms of trust and reputation, and discusses their relevance for the other key areas of Agreement Technologies. [...]
• Part VII provides examples of how the techniques outlined in the previous parts of the book can be used to build distributed software applications that solve real-world problems.

Please notice that the parts are supported by a set of video-lectures that can be freely downloaded from the web.

New EU Data Portal links to several law-related authority files

The new EU Data Portal has opened with a preliminary set of metadata, which include links to and descriptions of several law-related authority files:

• Names of legal roles
• Names of legal resource types
• Names of corporate bodies
• Names of treaties
• Names of inter-institutional legal procedures

Each authority file is available in SKOS, XML, XSD, and HTML, and is published by the EU Publications Office in its Metadata Registry.

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.

Doktori et al. on Analysis and Recommendations for an EU-Wide Online Dispute Resolution System

Daniel Doktori, Eugene Karlik, and Leila Perkins, all of Harvard Law School, have posted slides of a presentation entitled Stakeholder Analysis and Design Recommendations for an EU-Wide Online Dispute Resolution System, at odr.info.

According to Colin Rule‘s post entitled Excellent report from Harvard on ODR in the EU, this presentation was given at the meeting of the UNCITRAL ODR Working Group, held 21-25 May 2012 in New York, New York, USA.

Here is the executive summary:

CHALLENGE: E-commerce in the European Union (“EU”) is growing, but cross-border e-commerce lags in part due to mistrust of non-domestic vendors. E-commerce vendors fall outside the purview of most existing alternative dispute resolution (“ADR”) schemes. A new online dispute resolution (“ODR”) mechanism is needed to establish trust between consumers and vendors, to promote cross-border e-commerce, and to resolve future disputes between buyers and sellers online.

SOLUTION:

• The most prominent, respected, and reliable ADR paradigm in the EU is the industry ombudsman. The ombudsman model should be the basis for the future EU e-commerce ODR infrastructure.
• The reliability of the ombudsman model would maximize consumer trust and participation in an e-commerce platform.
• To scale the ombudsman model beyond its current orientation towards large, mature, regulated industries, EU ombudsman services will need to incorporate third-party ODR technology.
• Automated facilitated negotiation can streamline the pre-ombudsman process.
• Online complaint intake and data processing can reduce costs and increase speed.
• Automated evaluative prediction can promote early settlement before human review.
• A centralized EU-wide ODR platform should collect and distribute information that will create incentives for e-vendors to opt-in to the ombudsman systems.

Mason and Bromby on Electronic Identification, Authentication and Signatures in the European Digital Single Market

Stephen Mason, Barrister, and Dr. Michael Bromby of Glasgow Caledonian University, have published Response to Digital Agenda for Europe: Electronic identification, authentication and signatures in the European digital single market. Public consultation, European Journal of Law and Technology, 3(1) (2012).

Here are the authors’ recommendations:

It is recommended that the EU consider each item [that is the subject of the consultation] (electronic identification, electronic authentication and electronic signatures) separately.

Each Member State of the EU has implemented the Directive on electronic signatures in a different way, taking into account their legal and cultural norms. The way the Directive has been implemented has not caused e-commerce to fail. No evidence has been put forward to suggest that e-commerce between Member States is not effective because of the way electronic signatures are implemented in different Member States. It is recommended that in relation to Directive 1999/93/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 13 December 1999 on a Community framework for electronic signatures, OJ L 13, 19.01.2000, p.12, the EU either:

• repeal the Directive, or
• alter the Directive to be a Regulation, or
• repeal those parts of the Directive dealing with the technical details relating to advanced electronic signatures and qualified electronic signatures.

For more information, please see the complete article.

DGT-TM-2011, Parallel Corpus of All EU Legislation in Translation, Expanded to Include Data from 2004-2010

The DGT Multilingual Translation Memory of the Acquis Communautaire: DGT-TM — a parallel corpus of all European Union legislation, called the Acquis Communautaire, translated into all 22 languages of the EU nations — has been expanded to include EU legislation from 2004-2010, according to an April 2012 announcement on the DGT-TM Website. The updated corpus is called DGT-TM-2011.

The new content comes from the EU Official Journal Series L, 2004-2010.

According to the announcement, DGT-TM-2011 is the largest parallel corpus in the world, and is intended to be used for the following purposes:

• training automatic systems for statistical machine translation (SMT);
• producing monolingual or multilingual lexical and semantic resources such as dictionaries and ontologies;
• training and testing multilingual information extraction software;
• checking translation consistency automatically;
• testing and benchmarking alignment software (for sentences, words, etc.).

The DGT-TM-2011 should be a valuable resource for legal informatics and legal linguistics research and development.

For more information, please see:

• The official announcement;
• A new paper about DGT-TM-2011: Steinberger, R., et al. (2012). DGT-TM: A freely Available Translation Memory in 22 Languages, to be presented at LREC 2012;
• A new post about the DGT-TM-2011: Super-European language translation corpus, at Corpus Linguistics.

HT @moximer.

EU Council Invites EU Members to Use European Case Law Identifier and Standard Metadata for Court and Tribunal Decisions

The Council of the European Union (EU), on 29 April 2011, issued conclusions inviting EU member states to begin using “the European Case Law Identifier (ECLI) and a minimum set of uniform metadata for case law.”

In particular, the Council invites member states to apply ECLI to “all decisions rendered by all of their courts and tribunals,” and to apply the metadata set to “all decisions of courts and tribunals which are published on public websites.”

Detailed descriptions of the ECLI and the metadata set appear in the Annex to the document.

The document states that this measure is consistent with the Council’s earlier decision not to create a single database of all EU member states’ case law, but rather to develop a distributed system, enabled by interoperable metadata, for access to that case law.

For more information, please see the document.

HT Ronald van den Hoogen.

New on VoxPopuLII: Čyras on Legal Frameworks of Virtual Worlds

Professor Dr. Vytautas Čyras of the Vilnius University Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics has posted On a Legal Framework in a Virtual World: Lessons from the VirtualLife Project, on the VoxPopuLII Blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School.

In this post, Professor Čyras describes the regulatory infrastructure of VirtualLife, the experimental European Union-funded virtual world. In this infrastructure, legal and technological constraints are used together in an attempt to provide effective but flexible regulation.

Professor Čyras emphasizes the decentralized, “federalist” governance structure of VirtualLife — which provides for uniform protection of core rights while permitting groups to form smaller communities and to customize the laws that govern them — the peer-to-peer architecture of VirtualLife, which complements the decentralized governance structure; the VirtualLife e-contracting environment, which offers a variety of standard contract terms while allowing parties to create their own customized terms; and “virtual laws,” which enable technological grants and enforcement of intellectual property and other rights.

This post should be of interest to all those who are interested in the legal dimension of virtual worlds, including developers, policy makers, legal professionals, information systems researchers, and information providers.

Jones on A User Registration System for Regulations.gov

Gregory D. Jones has published a comment entitled Electronic Rulemaking in the New Age of Openness: Proposing a Voluntary Two-Tier Registration System for Regulations.gov, Administrative Law Review, v. 62, no. 4 (2010), pp. 1261-1286. Here is a summary:

This Comment argues that a voluntary two-tiered registration system that acknowledges the role of interest groups in rulemaking is best suited to meet the [Obama] Administration’s goals for open government. Part I briefly reviews the history of e-rulemaking in the United States, including the recent policies by the Obama Administration. It also considers how the role played by interest groups in rulemaking offers both advantages and disadvantages to agencies, and briefly considers several technical challenges posed by the current e-rulemaking model. Part II describes the European model [represented by the European Commission's Your Voice in Europe eParticipation service, and its Register of Interest Representatives] in more detail and explores the degree to which that model should be modified and imported to the United States. Part III considers the practical implications of importing the European model, focusing on the pros and cons of the proposed system. This Part weighs the perceived benefits of the system against its apparent costs, concluding that the import is worthwhile. In closing, this Comment recommends that the eRulemaking Program conduct an in-depth study and public consultation to further evaluate the costs of a voluntary two-tiered registration system.

European Citizens’ Initiative: Agreement Reached

The European Council and Parliament last week agreed on the provisions of the regulation governing the European Citizens’ Initiative, a direct democracy mechanism to be implemented in the EU in the coming year.

The Initiative will generate new types of legislative information that will be of interest to the legal informatics community.

Click here for the European Commission’s press release about the agreement.

Click here for the European Commission’s Website on the Initiative, including the text of the proposed regulation and an FAQ.

Click here for a video interview about the latest developments respecting the Initiative, with Rapporteur Diana Wallis MEP.

HT @jraybaut.