Vergottini: XML, HTML, JSON – Choosing the Right Format for Legislative Text

Grant Vergottini of Xcential Group has posted XML, HTML, JSON – Choosing the Right Format for Legislative Text, at Legix.info.

Here are excerpts:

I find I’m often talking about an information model and XML as if they’re the same thing. However, there is no reason to tie these two things together as one. Instead, we should look at the information model in terms of the information it represents and let the manner in which we express that information be a separate concern. In the last few weeks I have found myself discussing alternative forms of representing legislative information with three people – chatting with Eric Mill at the Sunlight Foundation about HTML microformats (look for a blog from him on this topic soon), Daniel Bennett regarding microdata, and Ari Hershowitz regarding JSON.

I thought I would try and open up a discussion on this topic by shedding some light on it. If we can strip away the discussion of the information model and instead focus on the representation, perhaps we can agree on which formats are better for which applications. Is a format a good storage format, a good transport format, a good analysis/programming format, or a good all-around format? [...]

Several examples are given. Then, Grant writes:

[...] There are many different ways of representing the same legislative model – each with its own strength and weaknesses. Different consumers have different needs. While XML is a good all-around format, it also brings with it some degree of sophistication and complexity that many information consumers simply don’t need to tackle. It should be possible, as a consumer, to specify the form of the information that most closely fits my need and have the legislative data source deliver it to me in that format. [...]

What do you think?

For more details, please see the complete post.

HT @arihersh

Nyman-Metcalf and Täks : Simplifying the law: Can ICT help us?

Professor Katrin Nyman-Metcalf and Ermo Täks, both of Tallinn University of Technology, have published Simplifying the law—can ICT help us? forthcoming in International Journal of Law and Information Technology.

Here is the abstract:

The article analyses how Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) can assist in simplifying law, by visualizing it and structuring it. It describes current research as well as activities by the European Union to make law more accessible by using ICT. The authors offers a new method for visualization of law for its better systematization and use, based on the legal language and its components.

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

Lissner and Carver on CourtListener: Where we are and where we’d like to go

Michael Lissner and Professor Dr. Brian Carver of University of California, Berkeley, have posted CourtListener: Where we are and where we’d like to go, at VoxPopuLII.

Here is an excerpt:

At CourtListener, we are making a free database of court opinions with the ultimate goal of providing the entire U.S. case-law corpus to the world for free and combining it with cutting-edge search and research tools. We–like most readers of this blog–believe that for justice to truly prevail, the law must be open and equally accessible to everybody.

It is astonishing to think that the entire U.S. case-law corpus is not currently available to the world at no cost. Many have started down this path and stopped, so we know we’ve set a high goal for a humble open source project. From time to time it’s worth taking a moment to reflect on where we are and where we’d like to go in the coming years. [...]

The post discusses the development and current technology of CourtListener, which includes email alerts of new cases, automatic identification and cross-linking of citations, a set of scrapers called Juriscraper for gathering court decisions from court Websites, and bulk access to court decisions in XML.

The post also describes future plans for development, which include:

adding oral argument audio, case briefs, and data from PACER. Adding these new types of information to CourtListener is a must if we want to be more useful for research purposes, but doing so is a long-term goal, given the complexity of doing them well.

We also plan to build an opinion classifier that could automatically, and without human intervention, determine the subsequent treatment of opinions. Done right, this would allow our users to know at a glance if the opinion they’re reading was subsequently followed, criticized, or overruled, making our system even more valuable to our users. [...] You can see our plans on our feature tracker, our bugs in our bug tracker, and can get in touch in our forum.

For more details, please see the complete post.

HT @caminick

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

Bina: An XML Solution for Legal Documents

George Bina of Sincro Soft / oXygen XML Editor, presented a paper entitled An XML Solution for Legal Documents, on 9 February 2013, at XML Prague 2013 Conference.

The full text of the paper is available here, at pages 51-60.

Here is the abstract:

All companies deal with legal documents. They are generally maintained in unstructured formats that do not allow reuse while most of these legal documents share common parts that should stay the same in all documents. We discovered that we have many end user license agreements, with very similar content and keeping them synchronized and making sure everything is up to date quickly become a challenge. This presentation shows the XML based solution we adopted to solve this problem that allows us to write once and publish in every place we need that information to be. Then we extended this to cover also the SDK agreement as well as our reseller agreements.

HT @JamieXML

Jaquith: Version 0.6 of The State Decoded released

Waldo Jaquith has released version 0.6 of The State Decoded, his open legal data and e-participation platform for U.S. states, as explained in his new post entitled Version 0.6 Released at The State Decoded blog.

Here is an excerpt from the post:

Version 0.6 of The State Decoded is now available on GitHub. This release is a really exciting one—it establishes a public API for State Decoded sites and creates a standard XML format for importing laws! This is an important release of The State Decoded, one that stands to significant increase the accessibility of the project to developers, both within the software and without. A total of 23 issues were resolved, nearly all of which are towards those two goals. [...]

For more details, please see the complete post.

HT @waldojaquith

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

Updated: Lists of Legal Metadata and Legal Knowledge Representation Resources

I’ve recently updated the list of legal metadata resources and the list of legal knowledge representation resources at Legal Information Systems and Legal Informatics Resources.

The list of legal metadata resources contains mostly schemas and standards for legal descriptive or structural metadata.

The list of legal knowledge representation resources lists resources including legal ontologies, Linked Data resources, subject headings lists, classification systems, and authority files.

The lists are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

If you know of other legal metadata or legal knowledge representation resources missing from those lists, please feel free to mention them in the comments to this post.

New: Akoma Ntoso Legal XML Subschema Generator

The Akoma Ntoso Subschema Generator has been released.

Here is Akoma Ntoso’s description of the application:

Akoma Ntoso is a standard to define simple, technology-neutral representations of Parliamentary Documents for e-Parliament services in a Pan-African context and provides an enabling framework for the effective exchange of “machine readable” Parliamentary Documents such as legislation, debate record, minutes, etc.

Akoma Ntoso uses XML Schema to define the XML vocabulary and grammatical constraints of its documents, and makes it possible to either use the general schema or to use simpler custom subschemas as long as they produce valid Akoma Ntoso documents.

The Akoma Ntoso Subschema Generator can therefore be used to generate subschemas that are guaranteed to generate valid Akoma Ntoso documents by restricting the vocabulary to only those elements and attributes that are actually needed in specific situations.

HT @JamieXML.