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

Colorado and Baltimore statutory codes posted free on the Web

The Colorado statutory code and the Baltimore, Maryland statutory code have been posted free on the Web by Public.Resource.Org.

Public.Resource.Org appears to be communicating with entities that assert copyright in those codes, about whether those entities will take legal action to prevent posting of those codes on the free Web and the use of those codes by developers to create new information resources.

HT @carlmalamud here and here

CanLII launches API

Colin Lachance of the Canadian Legal Information Institute (CanLII) tells us that CanLII, which provides free access to Canadian law, has opened an application programming interface (API).

A description appears below.

Colin has a new post at Slaw.ca that provides context for the API launch: Unbundling legal information.

Description of CanLII API:

This document describes the specifications of the CanLII API. The API provides over a million court judgments, tens of thousands of statutes and regulations and covers all the major courts and legislatures, as well as over 150 specialized courts and tribunals.

How it works

Let’s dig into the more technical information:

- The technical guidelines provide details about encoding, formats, error management and content negotiation.
- The technical guideline will give you detailed information on how to develop your client and interact with the API.

Supported Resources:

Currently, the API supports following services:

Legislation browse: Regulations and statutes from all Canadian federal, provincial and territorial jurisdictions,
Case browse: Judgments from all courts and tribunals accessible on CanLII.

On top of the complete documentation, you can also access directly to the content of the API thanks to the I/O Docs module. [...]

For the API key and for other details, please see the description.

HT @sglassmeyer

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

Glassmeyer: Electronic Legal Copyright, Citation, and Preservation Information Integrated with Open States Legislative Data Report Card

Sarah Glassmeyer, JD, MLS, of CALI, has posted a spreadsheet that integrates the Open States Open Legislative Data Report Card ratings with the National Inventory of Legal Materials (NILM).

The NILM, compiled by the American Association of Law Libraries, lists data about each U.S. state’s online legal materials regarding copyright assertion, authentication, preservation, official status, permanent public access, uniform citation, and enactment of the Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act.

For more information on the NILM, please see:

• Emily Feltren‘s December 2012 AALL Washington Blawg post, Update on the National Inventory of Legal Materials
• Emily Feltren and Tina S. Ching‘s February 2012 VoxPopuLII post, Protecting Access One Entry at a Time: An Update on the National Inventory of Legal Materials.

HT @sglassmeyer

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

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.

Legal Informatics Projects Featured at Open Data Day DC 2013

The program for Open Data Day DC 2013, also called Open Data Day 2013 Hackathon – DC Metro — to be held 23 February 2013 in Washington, DC, USA — includes at least four legal informatics projects:

• Contract/Procurement Visualization Sprint (Visualizing.org) [...]
• Open DC Zoning Data (@andrewsalzberg) [...]
• Parse dates and legal citations from RECAP documents [...]
• Discover Bill Pedigree

The Twitter hashtags for the event appear to be #opendataday #dc

Updates about the Open Data Day DC 2013 activities are available on the event’s hackpad.

If you know of other legal informatics projects to be discussed at Open Data Day DC 2013, please mention them in the comments.

Information about other legal hacking events appears here and here.

HT @JoshData

Open States now covers 50 U.S. states, DC, and Puerto Rico

The Open States law-related data project now covers all 50 U.S. states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico, according to a new post at Sunlight Foundation Blog.

Here is an updated description of Open States:

Open States is a collection of tools that make it possible for citizens to track what is happening in their state’s capitol by aggregating information from all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico.

Using the site is simple: enter a U.S. address or select a state to start to research bills, [track bills,] review voting records, contact elected officials and more. [...]

Open States data are available via API and via bulk download.

There is a python client for the API.

Legal informatics projects that use Open States data include David Moore‘s OpenGovernment.org and Waldo Jaquith‘s The State Decoded.

HT @openstates

Videos of Legal Information-related Presentations at Kick-starting the 113th Congress Conference

Click here for videos of legal information-related presentations at the Kick-starting the 113th Congress Conference, an event of the Advisory Committee on Transparency, held 28 January 2013 at the U.S. Congress’s Rayburn House Office Building, Washington, DC.