Gheen: W3C Government Linked Data Working Group Drafts Open for Comment, including Tennison’s RDF Data Cube Vocabulary

Tina Gheen, M.L.S., of the Law Library of Congress, has posted W3C Government Linked Data Working Group Drafts Open for Comment, on the In Custodia Legis blog.

The document RDF Data Cube Vocabulary, discussed in the post, is authored by Jeni Tennison of TSO.

Here is an excerpt from the post:

[The W3C Government Linked Data Working Group is] pleased to announce that the first public working drafts (FPWD) are now available for comment. We are asking the community to begin reviewing the following documents:

RDF People Vocabulary: http://www.w3.org/TR/vocab-people

DCAT Vocabulary: http://www.w3.org/TR/vocab-dcat

RDF Data Cube Vocabulary: http://www.w3.org/TR/vocab-data-cube

RDF Organizational Ontology: http://www.w3.org/TR/vocab-org

Comments should be submitted to the GLD Working Group by emailing public-gld-comments@w3.org.

This comment process is potentially of interest to the legal informatics community because the Linked Data standards being developed by the Working Group will be applicable to legal information. Ms. Gheen and Ari Hershowitz discuss this in the comments to the post.

For more information about the Working Group’s activities, please see the complete post.

For more information about the Law Library of Congress’s Linked Data activity, please see Ms. Gheen’s earlier post, A Law Classification Scheme as Linked Data?

Gheen on A Law Classification Scheme as Linked Data

Tina Gheen, M.L.S., of the Law Library of Congress, has posted A Law Classification Scheme as Linked Data?, on the library’s In Custodia Legis blog.

In this post, Ms. Gheen writes:

As part of the Law Library of Congress’ Law.gov project, we are consulting with the great minds behind the id.loc.gov linked data service of the Library of Congress to research whether a linked data version of the Law schedule of the Library of Congress Classification system, Class K, would be useful. [...] We think there is potential for the user community to find this kind of value in a linked data version of the Law Classification scheme as well.

But we’d really like your opinion. How would you use a linked data version of Class K? Do you see other applications for this kind of linked data in the legal and library communities?

For more information, please see the complete post.

Click here for more resources on Linked Data and law.

HT @LawLibCongress.

Weber on the 2011 LEX Summer School

Andrew Weber of the Law Library of Congress has posted Tools for My Trade?, an account of his experience at the 2011 LEX Summer School: Managing Legal Resources in the Semantic Web, held 5-10 September 2011 in Ravenna, Italy.

At the school, legal informatics scholars provide training to government technologists, private sector technologists, and information professionals respecting the application of XML and Semantic Web technology to legislative resources.

The post is published at the Law Library of Congress’s In Custodia Legis blog.

Mr. Weber’s post describes the standards and tools discussed during the school programs, as well as the textbook used for instruction: Giovanni Sartor, Monica Palmirani, Enrico Francesconi (Eds.), Legislative XML for the Semantic Web: Principles, models, standards for document management (2011).

For more information, please see the post.

New Law Library of Congress Blog: In Custodia Legis

Andrew Weber, J.D., M.P.I.A., of the Law Library of Congress will be a contributor to the library’s new legal blog, In Custodia Legis.

The blog will cover:

current legal trends, collecting for the largest law library in the world, a British perspective, a perspective from New Zealand, developments and enhancements in THOMAS, and cultural intelligence and the law.

Library of Congress Registers Law.gov Domain Name

Registration of the the Law.gov Internet domain name by the Library of Congress appears to be complete, according to the Law.gov domain name registration record in the WHOIS database of .gov domain names published by U.S. General Services Administration Office of Integrated Technology Services (OITS).

To display the record, go to the OITS WHOIS database site. In the “Lookup” box, in the space immediately below “Search the database:” enter Law.gov and click “Go.”

Finalization of the registration of the Law.gov domain name by the Library appears to have been mentioned by Roberta I. Shaffer, The Law Librarian of Congress, in her 10 July 2010 presentation at the American Association of Law Libraries’ Annual Meeting held in Denver, Colorado, according to a Twitter post by a librarian who attended the presentation.

The Library announced its intention to register the Law.gov domain name in January 2010.

The Law.gov domain name is also frequently mentioned in connection with the Law.gov legal open government data project. The Law Library of Congress has issued a public statement respecting the Library’s relationship to the Law.gov project.

Cornell Law.gov Workshop

Twitter tweets from the Cornell Law.gov Workshop are available at #lawgov. The purpose of this invitation-only workshop — being held 22-23 March 2010 at the Legal Information Institute (LII) at Cornell University Law School in Ithaca, New York, USA — is to begin the development of metadata standards for a proposed distributed registry and repository of all primary U.S. legal materials.

Click here for background on the Law.gov project. Thanks to LII Director Tom Bruce for graciously hosting this event.

Law.gov Upcoming Events [Updated]

[Click here for the latest update on Law.gov.]

[NOTE: These events are being tweeted on Twitter at #lawgov.]

The next announcement of events related to the Law.gov legal open government data project is expected to be issued during the week of 6 September 2010. Click here for the latest update on Law.gov.

Click here for video of previous Law.gov events.

Click here for the agendas of all of the Law.gov events held in the first half of 2010.

Click here for archived Twitter tweets from many Law.gov events.

HT Carl Malamud.

[This post was last updated 10 July 2010.]

Law.gov: Upcoming Events

[NOTE: Click here for a more recent version of this list of events.]

[NOTE: These events are being tweeted on Twitter at #lawgov.]

Here are upcoming events in connection with the Law.gov legal open government data project:

• March 22-23, 2010: Workshop, by invitation only, at Cornell’s Legal Information Institute;
• April 2, 2010: Putting the Law Online, A Law.Gov Workshop, at Silicon Flatirons Center at the University of Colorado Law School, Boulder, Colorado, USA, and cosponsored by the Wise Law Library at the University of Colorado and Public.Resource.Org. [Added on 2 March 2010; HT @carlmalamud]
• May 21, 2010: Chicago Law.gov Workshop at Chicago-Kent College of Law; Co-Sponsored by CALI and the Oyez Project [added on 9 March 2010];
• May 26, 2010: Law.gov Core Specifications Task Force Meeting, Washington, DC; co-convened by Vinton G. Cerf & James Stogdill [added on 9 March 2010].

HT Carl Malamud.

[NOTE: Updated on 9 March 2010, to add the May events indicated, and to delete the February events. Updated on 16 February 2010 to link to the New York Law School event.]

Video Available for Princeton Open Government Workshop Panels & Law.gov

Videos are now available for all of the workshop panels and the Law.gov panel from Open Government: Defining, Designing, and Sustaining Transparency (POGW), a workshop held 21-22 January 2010 at Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP).

Click here for a summary of the legal-information-related discussion at the workshop.

Work Has Begun on the National Inventory of Legal Materials, Related to Law.gov

[NOTE: Click here for an update on the National Inventory, from Erika Wayne (15 June 2010).]

Work has begun on the National Inventory of Legal Materials, a component of the Law.gov legal open government data project, according to Erika Wayne of the Stanford University Robert Crown Law Library.

(Click here for background information on the Law.gov project.)

The Twitter hashtag for the National Inventory is #NILM. Click here for archived Twitter tweets about the National Inventory.

According to Wayne, the National Inventory will consist of a list “of all primary legal materials” in the U.S. — “describing, detailing, and cataloging where one can find the laws of our Federal and State systems — and also of certain secondary legal resources that “are created as part of” administrative, legislative, or judicial law-making processes, ranging from “briefs and filings of attorneys to congressional testimony.”

Wayne states that, in order to “create this list, we will need the collaboration of librarians and researchers across the country” to engage in tasks including “the creation of the categories that we would use for collecting the information” and “the data entry itself.”

Wayne announces in her post that the first project related to the National Inventory will be organized by NOCALL, the Northern California Association of Law Libraries, which has established “a task force dedicated to creating a micro-inventory, focusing on California materials. We are using a shared spreadsheet and just beginning to fill out rows and columns.”

Wayne concludes, “If you want to help on the inventory, please let us know. What NOCALL is starting can and should be replicated in other areas.”

For more information, please see Wayne’s entire post.

[This post was last updated 15 June 2010.]

[NOTE added 2 March 2010: National Inventory of Legal Materials: A Call to Action is now available; per @evwayne, it "offers guidance and suggestions for creating the inventory."]

[NOTE: On 28 February 2010, a request for comments on an inventory of California legal information -- a prototype for the National Inventory of Legal Materials and a component of the Law.gov legal open government data project -- was issued by Erika Wayne. Click here for more details.]

[NOTE: On 22 February 2010 the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) Government Relations Office announced that they and Erika Wayne of the Stanford University Law Library have begun to organize working groups to build the National Inventory. HT @caminick.]