Jaquith launches Open Virginia data portal, providing access to legal data

Waldo Jaquith today launched Open Virginia, an open data platform for the U.S. state of Virginia.

Open Virginia is built with the CKAN open source data portal software.

Here is a description of Open Virginia:

Open Virginia is an effort to document the open government data published about the Commonwealth of Virginia—APIs, bulk downloads, and links to third-party data sources that provide much-needed information about how our government works.

Open Virginia currently offers access to legal data, including:

• the state’s legislative code
• code sections affected by bills 2006-
• a list of Virginia Court of Appeals decisions that cite a given law
• data on members of the state legislature

HT @shevski

Vergottini on Legal Reference Resolvers

Grant Vergottini of Xcential Group has posted Legal Reference Resolvers, at Legix.info.

The post addresses redirection, making references canonical, a repository service, and resolver routing.

For more details, please see the complete post.

HT @grantcv1

Bruce on the LII Legislative Metadata Model

Tom Bruce of the Legal Information Institute has posted Our Legislative Metadata Model, at Making Metasausage.

Excerpt:

Some months ago, I and some of my colleagues at the LII began to release a series of white papers that were written as part of the construction of a (mostly) comprehensive metadata model for Federal legislation. They are appearing as a series of blog posts in this blog. One which seemed more appropriate for VoxPopuLII – it had to do with metadata quality concerns that are not limited to legislation — was posted there yesterday. We’ll continue to adapt the white papers as blog posts and release them as Metasausage posts, but we thought that it was high time that we released full documentation of the model. Many of you have known of its existence for a while; we’ve been slow to release it because, well, we’re just overwhelmed with work.

The model is Linked-Data-friendly and designed to be highly extensible. We think it could serve as a reference model (by which I think I really mean “extensible scaffolding”) for a much more comprehensive metadata model for Federal legislation. As you’ll see when you read the documentation, we made no attempt to model things where we lacked domain expertise (appropriations and reconciliation being two), nor did we try to deal with the finer points of House and Senate rules when modeling process.

We’ll be interested in your reactions to it, and very, very interested in taking it further. Over the next month or so, we’ll actually build out what we’ve already put in the Open Metadata Registry into a full Linked Data representation online. [...]

The model was primarily done by myself, Diane Hillmann, John Joergensen, and Jon Phipps. [...]

Disclosure: I made small contributions to the model.

Click here for the LII Legislative Metadata Model documentation (in many formats).

For more details, please see the complete post.

HT @trbruce

Strause et al.: How Federal Statutes Are Named, and the Yale Database of Federal Statute Names

Renata E.B. Strause of Yale Law School, and colleagues, have published How Federal Statutes Are Named, Law Library Journal, 105, 7-30 (2013).

Here is a summary of the article:

The naming of [U.S.] federal statutes for individuals has received surprisingly little systematic attention. The purposes of this article are to trace the history of federal statutory naming conventions and to identify as authoritatively and as completely as possible the persons and political issues Congress has decided to honor or highlight in this fashion, as well as the proliferation of abbreviations as a further shortening of the short title.

In their research the authors used the Yale Law School Library’s Database of Federal Statute Names.

Jason Eiseman of the Yale Law School Library told us that, according to Strause et al. (2013), page 12, a key source of data for the Database of Federal Statute Names was the U.S. House of Representatives’ Office of the Law Revision Counsel’s Table of Popular Names (HT also Thom Neale of the Sunlight Foundation).

Other sources of popular name data for U.S. federal statutes include:

• The Legal Information Institute’s Table of Popular Names, developed by LII Director Tom Bruce
• the united states GitHub repository’s Bill Nicknames database, created by Eric Mill of the Sunlight Foundation
• THOMAS’s List of Bill Popular and Short Titles (HT Daniel Schuman of the Sunlight Foundation)
• Professor Richard Leiter of the University of Nebraska and Adrian White‘s Concordance of Federal Legislation (HT Richard Leiter)

Stephane Cottin of Secrétariat général du Gouvernement and ADIJ tells us that Legifrance publishes a similar list of popular names for French statutes, the Lois Dites….

The Yale Database of Federal Statute Names includes the following fields:

• Popular Name Statutized?:
• Type:
• Date Enacted:
• Short Title:
• Public Law citation:
• Statute At Large citation:
• Named For?:
• Link/Source:
• Notes:

According to Jason, the library does not currently provide an API or bulk access to the database, but is considering providing them in the future.

HT @maricheney and @jeiseman here and here, and the members of the Legal Informatics Research Network

Schuman on GPO’s New and Improved U.S. Statutes at Large, with Bulk Metadata in MODS

Daniel Schuman, Esq., of the Sunlight Foundation, has posted GPO is Closing Gap on Public Access to Law at JCP’s Direction, But Much Work Remains, on the Sunlight Foundation Blog.

The post describes the U.S. Government Printing Office’s making available United States Statutes at Large, 1951-2009, with full text for individual statutes in PDF and .txt formats, and for entire volumes in PDF format, and metadata for individual statutes and in bulk for each volume in MODS format.

For example, click here for bulk metadata for volume 123 of U.S. Statutes at Large, in MODS format.

Here are excerpts from the post:

The GPO’s recent electronic publication of all legislation enacted by Congress from 1951-2009 is noteworthy for several reasons. It makes available nearly 40 years of lawmaking that wasn’t previously available online from any official source, narrowing part of a much larger information gap. It meets one of three long-standing directives from Congress’s Joint Committee on Printing regarding public access to important legislative information. And it has published the information in a way that provides a platform for third-party providers to cleverly make use of the information. While more work is still needed to make important legislative information available to the public, this online release is a useful step in the right direction. [...]

In mid-January 2013, GPO published approximately 32,000 individual documents, along with descriptive metadata, including all bills enacted into law, joint concurrent resolutions that passed both chambers of Congress, and presidential proclamations from 1951-2009. The documents have traditionally been published in print in volumes known as the “Statutes at Large,” which commonly contain all the materials issued during a calendar year. [...]‘

The online release of the Statutes at Large from 1951 forward, accompanied by good quality metadata, has made it possible for the public to see important (and not so important) legislation. [...] Of course, the major New Deal legislation, such as the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934, and anything from the last quarter of the 19th century, is still unavailable from GPO. And GPO/LOC still hasn’t incorporated the information it has released onto THOMAS. However, the free legislative information portal GovTrack already jumped in with both feet, incorporating this information on its website where users can easily search and find historical bills going back to 1951.

Depending on the quality of the searchable PDFs GPO has posted, it may also be just a matter of time before someone pull out the text from the PDFs and puts it into a database, too. That would improve the ability to search for bills and facilitate analysis of congressional activities. It also moves us one step closer to a very difficult but important goal: allowing people to see in real time how draft legislation would amend the law. For that to be possible, GPO would need to publish the Statutes at Large from prior to 1951 online in electronic form, including making clear the underlying structure of the statutes, plus there’d have to be some pretty significant advances in the tools available to parse legislative language. [...]

For more details, please see the complete post.

Adreani: Retour d’expérience sur Juricaf

Guillaume Adreani of AHJUCAF has published Retour d’expérience sur Juricaf, la base de données de jurisprudence francophone, Revue générale du droit, January 2013.

The post describes the technology and functionality of Juricaf, the free and open database of francophone supreme court decisions, with particular emphasis on its use of open source software — including Apache Solr and CouchDB — its exposure of metadata in several formats including Dublin Core, its use of schema.org microdata, and the compatibility of its metadata with the Zotero open source citation management system.

Here are excerpts from the introduction:

Juricaf est une base de données de décisions de justice en français accessible gratuitement à l’adresse . Créée à l’initiative de l’AHJUCAF, l’association des cours de cassation francophones et réalisée par le Laboratoire Normologie, linguistique et informatique du Droit de l’Université de Paris I, elle publie à ce jour près de 800 000 documents issus de 42 pays et institutions francophones. Elle bénéficie également du soutien de l’Organisation internationale de la Francophonie. [...]

Quels sont les facteurs-clés pour la réussite d’un tel projet ?
Le moteur de recherche est au cœur d’un tel outil. Ses performances sont liées à l’utilisation d’outils en Open source. Trois autres critères sont déterminants pour que le projet soit crédible :

• Une alimentation en décisions de justice et une mise à jour automatisée,
• L’ajout d’innovations documentaires,
• Une exposition maximale des métadonnées. [...]

For more details, please see the complete article.

HT @adreagui

Access to U.S. Federal Court Decisions on FDsys Expanded to Permit All Federal Courts to Participate

Access to U.S. federal court decisions on the Government Printing Office (GPO)’s FDsys platform has been expanded to allow any federal court to choose to have its decisions made available on FDsys, according to a 31 January 2013 announcement by the Judicial Conference of the U.S.

Here is the text of the announcement:

A pilot project giving the public free, text-searchable, online-access to court opinions now is available to all federal appellate, district and bankruptcy courts.

The Judicial Conference, the policy-making body of the Federal court system, approved national implementation of the project with the Government Printing Office, Federal Digital System (FDsys), which provides free access to publications from all three branches of federal government via the Internet. The pilot project pulls opinions nightly from courts’ Case Management/Electronic Case Files (CM/ECF) systems and sends them to the GPO, where they are processed and posted on the FDsys website. The functionality to transfer opinions to FDsys is included in the latest release of CM/ECF which is now available to all courts. Twenty-nine courts participated in the original pilot, and now, all courts may opt to participate in the program.

Access to judicial opinions through FDsys allows the Judiciary to make its work more easily available to the public. Collections are divided into appellate, district or bankruptcy court opinions and are text-searchable across opinions and across courts. FDsys also permits embedded animation and audio.

Presently, more than 600,000 opinions dating back to 2004 are available. Opinions from the pilot are already one of the most heavily used collections on FDsys, with millions of retrievals each month.

Benefits of access to these decisions on FDsys include that GPO authenticates the PDF version of each decision, GPO creates a descriptive metadata record for each decision in the interoperable MODS format, and developers can harvest decisions and metadata from a single site.

HT @EJWalters

Van Opijnen on The European Legal Semantic Web

Marc van Opijnen of the The Netherlands Council for the Judiciary (Raad Voor de Rechtspraak) has posted the full text of his paper entitled The European Legal Semantic Web: Completed Building Blocks and Future Work, given last week at Journées européennes d’informatique 2012 = European Legal e-Access Conference.

Here is the abstract:

If constructed properly the European legal semantic web will improve access to legal information, stimulate innovative applications and legal services, and reinforce judicial and legal cooperation within Europe.

In this paper we will discuss why we still we do not have one-click answers on very basic legal questions, what building blocks are already in place and what still has to be done to have the European Legal Semantic Web really functioning.

We will start with some illustrations from legal practice to demonstrate the blessings of the semantic web, and the definition of some terminology (§ 1). Next, we will review the state of play regarding the most important building blocks for identifying legal sources (§ 2). In § 3 we will summarize the most necessary steps that have to be taken in the near future, both at European and national level, to make substantial headway. One of these steps might be the development of a European Legal Doctrine Identifier.

Some concluding remarks are made in § 4.

Among the resources discussed in the paper are:

• European case law identifier (ECLI)
• European legislation identifier (ELI)
• European legal doctrine identifier (ELDI)
• EUR-Lex
• CELEX

November 21-23: Journées européennes d’informatique juridique: European Legal e-Access Conference

Journées européennes d’informatique juridique: European Legal e-Access Conference is being held 21-23 November 2012 in Paris.

The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #legalaccess2012

Click here for archived Twitter tweets from the conference, in .csv format.

Click here for the conference program.

Click here for abstracts and slides of some of the presentations.

See the comments to this post for links to additional videos, slides, and papers from the conference and posts about the conference.

[NOTE: Updated 29 November 2012 to add the line referring readers to the comments.]

[NOTE: Updated 23 November 2012 to link to archived Twitter tweets.]

Casellas on Linked Legal Data: A SKOS Vocabulary for the Code of Federal Regulations

Dr. Núria Casellas of the Legal Information Institute has posted Linked Legal Data: A SKOS Vocabulary for the Code of Federal Regulations, under review at Semantic Web Journal.

Here is the abstract:

This paper describes the application of Semantic Web and Linked Data techniques and principles to regulatory information for the development of a SKOS vocabulary for the Code of Federal Regulations (in particular of Title 21, Food and Drugs). The Code of Federal Regulations is the codification of the general and permanent enacted rules generated by executive departments and agencies of the Federal Government of the United States, a regulatory corpus of large size, varied subject-matter and structural complexity. The CFR SKOS vocabulary is developed using a bottom-up approach for the extraction of terminology from text based on a combination of syntactic analysis and lexico-syntactic pattern matching. Although the preliminary results are promising, several issues (a method for hierarchy cycle control, expert evaluation and control support, named entity reduction, and adjective and prepositional modifier trimming) require improvement and revision before it can be implemented for search and retrieval enhacement of regulatory materials published by the Legal Information Institute. The vocabulary is part of a larger Linked Legal Data project [described here and here], that aims at using Semantic Web technologies for the representation and management of legal data.

HT @ncasellas