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

Vergottini: Automating Legal References in Legislation

Grant Vergottini of Xcential Group has posted Automating Legal References in Legislation,” at Legix.info.

This is a quite detailed post, with examples, describing a new legal URI standard or pattern, based on URN LEX and Akoma Ntoso References.

I believe Akoma Ntoso References is being developed by the OASIS LegalDocumentML Technical Committee.

For more details, please see Grant’s complete post.

HT @grantcv1

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 26 Call for Papers Deadline: Legal Resources from Text to Rules: Jurix Workshop

A call for papers — with submission deadline of 26 November 2012 — has been issued for the Jurix 2012 workshop entitled Legal Resources from Text to Rules, to be held 20 December 2012 in Amsterdam.

The workshop is being held in conjunction with JURIX 2012: International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, being held 17-20 December 2012 at Leibniz Center for Law, University of Amsterdam.

Here are details of the workshop:

The time is ripe for investigating the connections between the representation of legal XML texts and their formalization as legal rules.

For years these two communities have pursued their goals separately, but now emerging XML-based standards oriented both to legal documents (Akoma Ntoso, CEN Metalex, national XML standards, etc.) and to legal rules (LKIF, RuleML, RIF, SWRL, LegalRuleML, etc.) justify the possibility to combine techniques and foster their concrete application in the society (compliance, eGov services, legislative drafting, policy making applications, digital legal libraries, etc.).

This workshop aims to examine the relationship between legal computable ontologies as bridges from legal concepts and their legal texts and legal rules (predicates). Hybrid platform where ontologies are used to support legal reasoning and to create bidirectional dialogues with legal knowledge bases are part within the workshop scope.

Questions we will try to address:

• Are the statuses of legal XML standards fixed? What are the next steps?
• Are legal rules autonomous or they need to link their evidences to the text for support?
• Are multiple interpretations of a legal text possible without affecting its representations as legal XML documents?
• What are the roles of the legal ontologies and of semantic web (especially Linked Data) technologies in this scenario?

Proponents: Monica Palmirani, Fabio Vitali, Enrico Francesconi, Tom van Engers, Radboud Winkels

Selected papers will be published in the AICOL IV volume by the end of 2013, after a double peer-review process.

For more information, please see the call for papers.

HT Professor Palmirani

Bruce on Practical Principles of Free Access to Law

Tom Bruce of the Legal Information Institute has posted Practical Principles, the text of his presentation at AfricanLII’s Conference on Access to African Supranational and Regional Law, held earlier this week in Johannesburg.

The post gives an overview of several different sets of broad principles underlying the free access to law movement, and then presents Tom’s version of such principles, which covers the topics:

• Open Access
• Replication
• Open Standards
• International Cooperation

For more details please see the complete post.

HT @trbruce

Akoma Ntoso Developers Workshop

Applications are invited for the Akoma Ntoso Developers Workshop to be held 17-18 Sept. 2012, at the University of Bologna’s campus in Ravenna, Italy.

Akoma Ntoso is a legal XML standard.

The workshop is being held in conjunction with the LEX 2012 Summer School: Managing Legal Resources in the Semantic Web (formerly the Legislative XML Summer School), to be held 10-15 September 2012, in Ravenna.

Posts and Resources About International Legislation Unhackathon

Here are links to posts and other resources (that I’ve been able to identify) about the International Legislation Unhackathon, held 19 May 2012. (If you know of other posts or resources about the event, please tell us about them in the comments):

• Archived tweets from the event, in .csv format (see other tweets about the event at hashtag #legalhacks)
• U.S. state legislation marked up during the event (click on a shaded state to see legislation from that state)
• National legislation marked up during the event (click on a shaded country to see legislation from that country)
• An overview of the event, and comments contributed during the event, available on the event’s Wiki
• Grant Vergottini’s summary post about the event, entitled Unhackathon Wrapup
• Ari Hershowitz’s summary post about the event, entitled International Legislative Unhackathon and G+ Hangout
• Videos shown during the event
• Grant Vergottini’s new HTML-based XML legislation editor, used during the event
• Grant Vergottini’s posts about the event (written before the event)
• Ari Hershowitz’s posts about the event (written before the event: here and here)
• Alex Hendler’s post looking forward to the event, entitled How to Eat Legislative Sausage
• Background information about the event

Click here for upcoming legal hacking events.

Find news about upcoming legal hacking events at hashtags #legalhack and #legalhacks.

Click here for posts and resources about other legal hacking events held recently.

May 19 International Legislative Hackathon

[Note: For follow-up information about the International Legislation Hackathon 2012 -- including legislation marked up during the event, archived tweets, and videos -- please see Posts and Resources About International Legislation Unhackathon.]

The International Legislative Unhackathon will be held 19 May 2012 at multiple locations:

• the University of California, Hastings College of Law, in San Francisco, California;
• Stanford University in Stanford, California;
• Denver, Colorado; and
• online.

The Twitter hashtag for the event is #legalhacks [Click here to access archived tweets from the event, in .csv format.]

Click here for the event’s Website.

The URL for the Google + hangout for the event is http://bit.ly/Ko6RI0.

Click here for the event’s registration site.

Click here for the event’s Wiki.

The event is being organized by Ari Hershowitz of Tabulaw and Grant Vergottini of Xcential Group.

Here is a description of the event from the event Website:

LEGAL HACKS is hosting an International Legislation UNHackathon sponsored by the Hastings Science and Technology Law Journal.

Participants will gather in groups and “mark up” existing laws into an XML format based on an international standard to promote transparency, accountability, democratic participation, and good governance. Working together, attorneys and technologists will identify the best methods to markup relevant laws into the XML standard.

Some of the key areas of focus will be Constitutions, Privacy laws, and Open Government Laws, but participants can choose to work on other areas of law too.

Don’t know what “mark up?” means? Don’t worry, it’s easy. Come, learn, and contribute!

Please be sure to bring your laptop with an up-to-date browser – either Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Safari!

AGENDA FOR MAY 19TH [All times are Pacific Time]

11:30 [a.m.] – 12:30 [p.m.] Registration and Lunch

12:30 – 1:00 [p.m.] Official Start: Ignite Speech, Grant Vergottini, Jim Harper.

(Google+ Hangout On Air)

1:00 – 1:15 Brief tutorial to explain XML standard and how marking up works

1:15 – 1:30 Brainstorm on areas of the law to mark up

1:00 – 5:00 Markup – Break – Discuss

5:00 – post-mixer (location TBA)

Share your thoughts here (Eventbrite) or on the Wiki we have set up for the occasion:

http://code.google.com/p/legal-hack/

For more information, please see the event’s Website.

Click here for Grant Vergottini’s post providing background information about the event.

Click here for the HTML5-based legislation editor that Grant developed for the event.

Palmirani on LegalDocML @ International Workshop: Identifying Benefits Deriving from the Adoption of XML-based Chains for Drafting Legislation

Professor Dr. Monica Palmirani of Università di Bologna Dipartimento di Scienze Giuridiche «Antonio Cicu» and CIRSFID sends us the following post:

LegalDocML was announced and presented on May 3rd and 4th at Brussels, at the International Workshop “Identifying benefits deriving from the adoption of XML-based chains for drafting legislation”. The initiative was organized by the European Parliament’s Office for Promotion of Parliamentary Democracy, in association with the UN/IPU’s Global Center for ICT in Parliament. The LegalDocML chairs (Palmirani and Vitali) presented the benefits of the application of Akoma Ntoso to the legislative drafting process. The secretaries of LegalDocML TC Ashok Hariharan (UN/DESA) and Claudio Fabiani (EU Parliament) presented two tools (Bungeni-Editor and AT4AM) for the legislative workflow, both based on Akoma Ntoso.

Hershowitz on Legislative Standards and the International Legislation Unhackathon

Ari Hershowitz of Tabulaw has posted Legislative Standards and the International Legislation Unhackathon, at the Tabulaw Blog.

Here is an excerpt from the post:

The International Legislation Unhackathon is being held May 19 at UC Hastings and Stanford Law Schools. Sign up, if you haven’t already, at http://internationallegislation.eventbrite.com/. [...]

The event is designed to be accessible for non-programmers and non-lawyers (hence an ‘un’hackathon) who will ‘get their hands dirty’ adding metadata to actual legislation, using a developing international standard for legislative data, Akoma Ntoso. Future (and previous) posts will discuss such questions as Why Metadata in Legislation? and Why should legislatures use XML standards. You could get started by reading this excellent post by Andrew Mandelbaum of the National Democratic Institute.

Assuming that you agree that metadata and standards for legislation are a good thing, there are still questions of implementation:
(1) At a technical level (does the proposed standard actually match the structure of real legislation ‘in the wild’; is it workable, etc.), and
(2) At the practical level (will legislatures actually adopt the standard, or can the private sector add the metadata post-facto to legislation?).

This unhackathon will be an experiment in both of these elements of implementation. Grant [Vergottini] is developing a browser-based tool to easily add Akomo Ntosa metadata to legislation. The idea is to lower the barrier for anyone to just try it out. It should take no more than 5 minutes to learn how to add the data fields to legislation. Then the real test– how well does the data model fit the actual data of laws? Can it be extended easily, for example to accomodate the requirements of the DATA Act?

For more information, please see the complete post.

HT Ari Hershowitz.