Legislation.gov.uk Wins UK Public Sector Digital Award

Legislation.gov.uk, the UK’s official free and open online legislative service, has won the UK Public Sector Digital Award for “Best example of ICT-enabled innovation and enterprise,” according to a 20 January 2012 announcement on The National Archives Website.

The announcement describes Legislation.gov.uk as follows:

Legislation.gov.uk is a world first – the first linked data statute book. This means that people can re-use legislation data in other applications or link it to other databases. This has led to The National Archives developing a new, transferable business model for updating government databases.

For more information about Legislation.gov.uk, please see John Sheridan’s post, “Legislation.gov.uk,” at VoxPopuLII.

Click here for Paul Appleby’s recent post about new automatic updating technology being added to Legislation.gov.uk.

Click here for other resources on Linked Data and law.

New on VoxPopuLII: Sheridan on Legislation.gov.uk

John Sheridan, Head of e-Services and Strategy at The [UK] National Archives, has posted Legislation.gov.uk, on the VoxPopuLII Blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School.

In his post, Mr. Sheridan describes the origins and functionality of Legislation.gov.uk, the innovative new official legislative information system for the United Kingdom.

Mr. Sheridan offers an account of the user research that gave rise to Legislation.gov.uk: that research showed that users frequently did not understand the currency or status of the legislation they accessed online. These findings led Mr. Sheridan and his team to develop a new system that employs visualizations and other tools to make clear to users whether the legislation they are viewing is in force and is the most current version available. Mr. Sheridan and his team also created a point-in-time legislative information system, which allows users to view how a statutory provision appeared at a given chronological moment.

Mr. Sheridan’s post then explores the innovative technology that powers Legislation.gov.uk, including:

• Linked Data, enabling automatic semantic processing of legal texts;
• The combined use of Permanent URIs, Representational State Transfer (REST), and object-oriented design and modelling characteristic of the O’Reilly Media PRESTO architecture;
• Open government data, characterized by the provision of bulk access to data in machine-processable formats via an open Application Programming Interface (API), and Creative-Commons-type “copyleft” licensing;
• A sophisticated metadata model — incorporating FRBR, the CEN MetaLex vocabulary, Dublin Core Terms, and the Crown Legislation Markup Language and XML Schema for Legislation — enabling advanced version control and output of descriptive metadata;
• Content negotiation, facilitating output of legislative data in a wide range of formats; and
• Creative use of open source software.

Mr. Sheridan demonstrates how stakeholders — such as the UK’s Electronic Service Delivery system — are beginning to build on Legislation.gov.uk’s technology, by extracting valuable data from statutes, and developing new, Linked-Data-based information systems with it.

In his post, Mr. Sheridan welcomes feedback from readers about such issues as compatibility with standards — including CEN MetaLex, OAI-PMH, and URN:LEX — and the use of RDF to represent complex attributes of legislation.

Mr. Sheridan concludes by inviting members of the private and public sectors and of civil society to explore Legislation.gov.uk and to use its data in innovative ways.

The New Legislation.gov.uk: Legislation as Open Linked Data

John L. Sheridan of the UK National Archives and his team have released Legislation.gov.uk, which presents UK legislation as Linked Data, and provides free public access — including bulk access via RESTful API — to UK legislation and legislative metadata in a range of formats, including XML.

Legislation.gov.uk includes both statutes and statutory instruments. Click here for details on the contents of Legislation.gov.uk.

According to the API information page, Legislation.gov.uk data is “free for re-use under data.gov.uk licence terms,” which have “been aligned to be interoperable with any Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Licence. This means that you may mix the information with Creative Commons licensed content to create a derivative work that can be distributed under any Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Licence.”

The new Legislation.gov.uk embodies three key current technology developments relevant to legal informatics:

• The combined use of Permanent URIs, Representational State Transfer (REST), and object-oriented design and modelling characteristic of the O’Reilly Media PRESTO architecture;
• Open government data, characterized by the provision of bulk access to data in machine-processable formats, and Creative-Commons-type “copyleft” licensing; and
• Linked Data, enabling automatic semantic processing of legal texts.

Mr. Sheridan identifies three legal informatics efforts in particular as having furnished ideas that inform Legislation.gov.uk:

• PRESTO, Rick Jelliffe‘s WWW Information Architecture for Legislation and Public Information systems;
• KLISS: The Kansas Legislative Information Services System, created by Sean McGrath of Propylon, for its innovative use of URIs; and
• The Law.gov legal open government data project, and particularly the work of Carl Malamud of Public.Resource.Org.

Of particular interest is the section of the API information page entitled What We Hope Others Might Do, which discusses potential uses of the data accessible via Legislation.gov.uk. This section notes particularly ESD Toolkit, which “have already linked their listing of the powers and duties in legislation on Local Authorities to legislation.gov.uk URIs and are making use of the API to deliver their service.”

Congratulations to Mr. Sheridan and his team on the launch of this highly innovative and generative system!