Manzoli on Legal Taxonomies and Legal Folksonomies

Serena Manzoli, LL.M., has published Taxonomies Make the Law. Will Folksonomies Change It?, at VoxPopuLII.

Here are excerpts from the post:

[...] the problems with legal taxonomies occur when the creators and the users don’t share the same frame of mind. And this is most likely to happen when the creators of the taxonomy are lawyers and the users are not lawyers. [...]

Let’s come to folksonomies now. Here, the mismatch between creators (lawyers) and users’ way of reasoning is less likely to occur. The very same users decide which category to create and what to put into it. Moreover, more tags can overlap; that is, the same object can be tagged more than once. This allows the user to consider the same object from different perspectives. [...]‘

What legal folksonomies bring us is:

• User-centered categories
• Flexible categorization systems. Many items can be tagged more than once and so be put into different categories. Legal stuff can be retrieved through different routes but also considered under different lights.

Will this enhance findability? I think it will, especially if the users are non-lawyers. And services that target the low-end of the legal market usually target non-lawyers. [...]

Prediction #1: Folksonomies will provide the right information architecture for non-legal users. [...]

Prediction #2: legal folksonomies in legal teaching would keep lawyers’ minds flexible. [...]

Prediction #3 Legal folksonomies will make the law apply differently.

Let’s wait and see. Let the users tag. Where this tagging is going to take us is unpredictable, yes, but if you look at where taxonomies have taken us for all these years, you may find a clue.

I have a gut feeling that folksonomies are going to change the way we search, teach, and apply the law.

For more details, please see the complete post.

HT @squarelaw

Bulk Access to Law-Related Linked Data: LC & VIAF Name Authority Records and LC Subject Authority Records

Linked Data versions of Library of Congress name authority records and subject authority records are now available for bulk download from the Library of Congress Linked Data Service, according to Kevin Ford at Library of Congress.

In addition, VIAF, the Virtual International Authority File, now provides bulk access to Linked Data versions of name authority records for organizations, including government entities and business organizations, from more than 30 national or research libraries. VIAF data are also searchable through the VIAF Web user interface.

Together, these services provide bulk access to Linked Data versions of a very large number of authority records for names of government entities in many countries–names which play a prominent role in many kinds of legal data. Moreover, the Library of Congress Subject Authority records service provides access to a very large set of Linked Data versions of records for legal subjects from many different legal systems; the coverage provided by those records varies from legal system to legal system, but is often very broad and is in some instances comprehensive.

These Linked Data resources can be downloaded and incorporated into new or existing legal information systems that employ Linked Data technology. In addition, because each authority record in these data sets contains a unique URI and is publicly accessible on the Web, legal information systems that employ Linked Data technology can link out to relevant authority records at VIAF or the Library of Congress, as part of the development of the legal portion of the Semantic Web.

Click here for a list of additional law-related Linked Data resources.

HT @3windmills here and here

Ford: Law Classification Added to Library of Congress Linked Data Service

Kevin Ford of the Library of Congress has posted Law Classification Added to Library of Congress Linked Data Service, at In Custodia Legis.

Here are excerpts from the post:

The Library of Congress is pleased to make the K Class – Law Classification – and all its subclasses available as linked data from the LC Linked Data Service, ID.LOC.GOV. K Class joins the B, N, M, and Z Classes, which have been in beta release since June 2012. With about 2.2 million new resources added to ID.LOC.GOV, K Class is nearly eight times larger than the B, M, N, and Z Classes combined.[...]

Please explore the K Class for yourself at http://id.loc.gov/authorities/classification/K or all of the classes at http://id.loc.gov/authorities/classification. [...]

As always, your feedback is important and welcomed. [...] we are particularly interested in how the data available from ID.LOC.GOV is used and continue to encourage the submission of use cases describing how the community would like to apply or repurpose the LCC data. [...]

For more details, please see the complete post.

Click here for other law-related Linked Data resources.

HT @atweber

Akoma Ntoso and Linked Data at the Italian Senate

Akoma Ntoso’s Website has posted Akoma Ntoso adopted by the Italian Senate.

Here is an excerpt:

Starting from 23 February 2013, all the bills published on the Italian Senate website are available, other than in the usual HTML, PDF, and ePub formats, also in XML, using an Akoma Ntoso compliant scheme.

The Italian Senate, in the wake of the European Parliament, has also joined the growing number of parliaments supporting Akoma Ntoso as common to support more effective management of information and long-term preservation of formal documentation.

Akoma Ntoso is the result of the efforts of the Africa i-Parliaments Action Plan to realize a common standard for the interchange of legal documents among institutions and countries. Building on the opportunities offered by open standards, it aims at supporting the development of high-value parliamentary and legislative information services. [...]

In addition, the Italian Senate has made available a SPARQL endpoint for legislative Linked Data.

HT @cottinstef and @adreagui

Legal Document Cloud

There has been some discussion recently of a legal document cloud: a version, specifically for legal texts, of DocumentCloud, the online document repository for journalists that uses OpenCalais to perform semantic analysis and annotation of documents.

[Here is a recent example of the use of DocumentCloud to annotate a legal text, in this instance the U.S. federal district court decision, in the National Security Letters case.]

As he was leaving the Open Data Day DC 2013 hackathon, Alan deLevie tweeted about a legal document cloud.

In a Twitter discussion of this topic at the end of Open Data Day DC 2013, Jonathan Stray said that Docracy is a legal document cloud service, with version control. [Docracy has just opened a beta version of a new technology called The Document Genome, that performs legal document comparison, summarization, and versioning, for a number of applications including compliance.]

Stray also suggested using the Associated Press’s Overview platform to do classification (tagging) of legal document collections.

Then, on March 5, 2013, Alan deLevie posted a readme for a proposed legal document cloud, on GitHub. Here are excerpts of the readme:

What?

I’m trying to build a set of standardized tools for one basic task: Looping through lots of law-related text, processing it, and saving the results. [...]

Why?

Under the hood, you’ll get parallelism and remote code execution from IronWorker. This has several advantages over running this code on your laptop:

Performance. Splitting up the work into chunks is an obvious win.

Reliability. In the middle of a large processing job, and the power goes out and your laptop battery is about to die? No worries. Your job continues to run, with results stored safely.

Curation. The legal informatics/open government/open data communities are coalescing in a great way. Many standalone scripts are emerging for specific text processing tasks. I’d like this repo to be a central place where anyone can quickly make use of these great tools. Batteries included will lower barriers to entry.

Standardization. The legal informatics community could gain by adopting a standard project structure.

Verification. This builds off of point 4. Need to show how you arrived at a certain set of findings? This could be done in maybe ~20 lines of code.

I envision something as simple as installing a Ruby gem, adding some API keys, mixing and matching text processors to suit your needs, then running your corpus through in a simple loop. [...]

A related resource: in October 2012 Elmer Masters of CALI described his proposal for a new cloud-based repository of court decisions, called CourtCloud.

If you know of other information regarding a legal document cloud, please share it in the comments to this post.

[NOTE: Edited on 18 March 2013 to clarify that the idea of a legal document cloud was not discussed aloud at Open Data Day DC 2013 but was instead mentioned on Twitter by Alan deLevie as he was leaving Open Data Day DC 2013. HT @adelevie here and here.]

Hallo Carrasco et al.: Data models for version management of legislative documents

María Hallo Carrasco of National Polytechnic School, Ecuador, and Professor Dr. M. Mercedes Martínez-González and Pablo de la Fuente Redondo, both of University of Valladolid, have published Data models for version management of legislative documents, forthcoming in Journal of Information Science.

Here is the abstract:

This paper surveys the main data models used in projects including the management of changes in digital normative legislation. Models have been classified based on a set of criteria, which are also proposed in the paper. Some projects have been chosen as representative for each kind of model. The advantages and problems of each type are analysed, and future trends are identified.

The legislative metadata models discussed in the paper include:

• Agora-Lex
• AKOMA NTOSO
• CEN Metalex
• EnACT
• ESTRELLA General XML format(s) for legal Sources
• Legislation.gov.uk
• Legislative Documents in XML at the United States House of Representatives
• Norma
• Norme in Rete

Call for papers: RuleML 2013: International Web Rule Symposium

The call for papers has been issued for RuleML 2013: International Web Rule Symposium, to be held 11-13 July 2013 in Seattle, Washington, USA.

Submission deadlines are 19 February for abstracts and 20 February for full papers.

Papers are invited on the following topics:

• Rules and automated reasoning
• Rule-based policies, reputation, and trust
• Rule-based event processing and reaction rules
• Rules and the web
• Fuzzy rules and uncertainty
• Logic programming and nonmonotonic reasoning
• Non-classical logics and the web (e.g modal and epistemic logics)
• Hybrid methods for combining rules and statistical machine learning techniques (e.g., conditional random fields, PSL)
• Rule transformation, extraction, and learning
• Vocabularies, ontologies, and business rules
• Rule markup languages and rule interchange formats
• Rule-based distributed/multi-agent systems
• Rules, agents, and norms
• Rule-based communication, dialogue, and argumentation models
• Vocabularies and ontologies for pragmatic primitives (e.g. speech acts and deontic primitives)
• Pragmatic web reasoning and distributed rule inference / rule execution
• Rules in online market research and online marketing
• Applications of rule technologies in health care and life sciences
• Legal rules and legal reasoning
• Industrial applications of rules
• Controlled natural language for rule encoding (e.g. SBVR, ACE, CLCE)
• Standards activities related to rules
• General rule topics

For more details, please see the call.

LegalRuleML, a law-specific version of RuleML currently being developed by the OASIS LegalRuleML Technical Committee, will be discussed at the conference, and papers about LegalRuleML are welcome. Click here for slides of a tutorial about LegalRuleML.

HT Dr. Roland Vogl

Call for Papers: LVI 2013: Law via the Internet Conference

The call for papers and presentation proposals has been issued for LVI 2013: Law via the Internet Conference, to be held 26-27 September 2013 on the Channel Island of Jersey.

The conference Website does not seem to state the deadline for submitting papers or proposals. If you know the submission deadline, please feel free to tell us in the comments to this post.

[UPDATE 11 February 2013: The conference organizers now say the submission deadline is 31 March 2013.]

Papers are invited on the topics covered by any of the seven tracks in which the conference program is divided:

• E-Learning: distance, blended, open, mobile, gaming, MOOCing and more?
• Online legal information – starting from scratch
• Legal knowledge in the age of the semantic web
• Communicating our work: journals, blogs and other ways of publishing about open access
• Privacy v open government in legal publishing
• Emerging patterns of information access and usage
• Technological development and free access to law

The conference Twitter account is @JerseyLVI2013 and the conference hashtag is #lvi2013

For details about the tracks, please see the track Websites.

For more details about the conference, please see the conference Website.

Call for Papers: AICOL 2013: Workshop on AI Approaches to the Complexity of Legal Systems

A call for papers — with abstract submission deadline of 28 February 2013 and full paper submission deadline of 15 May 2013 — has been issued for AICOL 2013: Workshop on AI Approaches to the Complexity of Legal Systems, to be held at a date to be determined, between 21 and 27 July 2013, in Belo Horizonte, Brazil.

The workshop is being collocated with XXVI. World Congress of Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy.

Papers for AICOL 2013 are invited on the following topics:

• Law and Science
• Knowledge Management
• Law and Cognitive Science
• Cognitive schemas
• Law and Complexity Theory
• Law and Robotics
• Complex Systems
• Law and Mathematics
• Legal Theory
• Legal Graphic Representation
• Legal Culture
• Game Theory
• Computer Ethics
• Formalization of Legal Systems and Norms
• Artificial Societies
• Rules and Standards
• Argumentative Frameworks
• Agreement technologies
• Legal Ontologies
• Electronic Institutions
• Governance
• Legal Concepts
• Legal Information Retrieval
• Legal Thesauri
• Online Dispute Resolution
• Taxonomies
• Trends in e-Discovery, e-Courts, e-Administration
• Natural Language Processing (NLP)
• Legal Knowledge Acquisition
• Users’ studies
• Legal Knowledge Representation

For more details, please see the call.

HT Professor Dr. Monica Palmirani

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.