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

14-15 March: Wikipedia and Legislative Data Workshop, Washington, DC

Jim Harper, Esq., of the Cato Institute tells us of this interesting event:

Wikipedia and Legislative Data Workshop, 14-15 March, Washington, DC.

Description:

Interested in the bills making their way through Congress?

Think they should be covered well in Wikipedia?

Well, let’s do something about it!

On Thursday and Friday, March 14th and 15th, we are hosting a conference here at the Cato Institute to explore ways of using legislative data to enhance Wikipedia.

Our project to produce enhanced XML markup of federal legislation is well under way [see examples of the XML markup at DeepBills (here and here)], and we hope to use this data to make more information available to the public about how bills affect existing law, federal agencies, and spending, for example.

What better way to spread knowledge about federal public policy than by supporting the growth of Wikipedia content?

Thursday’s session is for all comers. Starting at 2:30 p.m., we will familiarize ourselves with Wikipedia editing and policy, and at 5:30 p.m. we’ll have a Sunshine Week reception. (You don’t need to attend in the afternoon to come to the reception. Register now!)

On Friday, we’ll convene experts in government transparency, in Wikipedia editorial processes and decisions, and in MediaWiki technology to think things through and plot a course.

Do you have relevant interests and experience? Please apply! Applications for participation in the Friday session are due Friday, March 1. [...]

For more information or to register, please see the announcement.

HT @Jim_Harper

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

Mill: U.S. House of Representatives floor proceedings in bulk XML

Eric Mill of the Sunlight Foundation points us to a new legislative bulk data resource: U.S. House of Representatives’ floor proceedings in bulk XML, 2005 to present (also called House Floor Activities Download).

The announcement of the availability of these data, by the Speaker of the House, states that this is the first project of the new Legislative Branch Bulk Data Task Force.

JURIX 2012: 17-19 December

JURIX 2012: International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems is being held 17-19 December 2012, at Leibniz Center for Law, University of Amsterdam.

The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #jurix2012

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

Click here for the conference program.

Click here for the list of workshops and tutorials.

HT @jurixfoundation

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