Propylon to Develop a Legislative Information System for Ohio

Sean McGrath of Propylon has announced that Propylon will develop a legislative information system for the U.S. state of Ohio, similar to Propylon’s Kansas Legislative Information Services System (KLISS).

The announcement appears in Mr. McGrath’s post, Ohio State Legislature, on his blog.

According to the post, the Ohio system will employ Propylon’s Legislative Workbench technology and will feature “machine readable data formats and Web feeds.”

For more information please see the complete post.

For more information on KLISS, please see Mr. McGrath’s series of posts about KLISS.

Preservation of Legal Information Highlighted in Lee: Review of State Projects Funded by NDIIPP

The preservation of judicial and legislative information is highlighted in a new report by Christopher A. Lee of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, entitled States of Sustainability: A Review of State Projects funded by the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP).

NDIIPP is led by the Library of Congress.

The preservation of legislative and court information is targeted by two projects described in the report:

• The Model Technological and Social Architecture for the Preservation of State Government Digital Information (MTSA) Project, led by the Minnesota Historical Society; and
• Kansas Enterprise Electronic Preservation (KEEP), which is to be integrated with Kansas Legislative Information Systems and Services (KLISS).

Among the notable aspects of these projects is the development and use of XML technologies for legislative documents. The report also addresses the role of the Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act (UELMA) in offering a policy framework for state-level efforts to preserve digital legal information.

For more information, please see the complete report.

Quora Discussion: Version Control for Legislation

An interesting discussion of version control for legislation in digital formats took place this past week on Quora.

Ari Hershowitz of Tabulaw began the discussion.

Contributors to the discussion included Tom Bruce of the Legal Information Institute, Marci Harris of POPVOX, Sean McGrath of Propylon, John Sheridan of The National Archives (UK), and Joshua Tauberer of GovTrack and POPVOX.

McGrath on Legislative Workbench Legislative Information System

Sean McGrath of Proplyon has posted Legislative Workbench (LWB) Technical White Paper, Version 1.0 (2011).

The paper describes the architecture of the system that powers KLISS, the Kansas Legislative Information Services System.

Click here for Sean’s earlier posts about KLISS.

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!

McGrath on KLISS: The Kansas Legislative Information Services System

Sean McGrath of Proplyon, has written a very interesting series of posts about the technology of KLISS: The Kansas Legislative Information Services System, which he has been developing over the past two years.

Click here for the latest post, entitled KLISS: Law as Source Code.

Click here for for the series.