Hendler on Organizing and Accessing Code-like Legal Materials

Alex M. Hendler, Esq., of ontolawgy LLC, has posted How to eat legislative sausage, on the ontolawgy Blog.

In this post, Mr. Hendler describes methods for organizing digital versions of codified statutes or regulations, citing Tom Bruce’s recent post on legislative identifiers and Grant Vergottini’s response to Tom’s post. Mr. Hendler explains how his cloud-based legal analysis and knowledge management system, called ontolawgy, which uses Semantic Web technology, addresses the issues raised in those posts.

In the second part of his post, Mr. Hendler argues that digital full-text versions of U.S. federal statutes and regulations currently available from the U.S. Government are flawed, particularly respecting indentation. He writes:

If anyone has some insight about how to get the government to bring useful and accurate indentation to its official publications, please get in touch, I would be thrilled to work with you to help make this happen.

For more information, please see the complete post.

Vergottini on The State of the Art in Legislative Editors and the DATA Act

Grant Vergottini of Xcential Group has posted The State of the Art in Legislative Editors and the DATA Act, at his Legix.info blog.

In this post, Mr. Vergottini comments on the new EC ISA report on current legislative editors, LEOS: Legislative Editing Open Software: Final Results (May, 2012).

Mr. Vergottini also comments on a pending piece of U.S. federal legislation, the DATA Act (H.R. 2146), about which he says:

Viewed as an opportunity, this act could ultimately drive better cooperation amongst the various state legislatures. This cooperation would improve innovation and progress in US legislative systems by focusing on common approaches and open standards. This less insular viewpoint would, as a result, improve efficiency and lower costs. Common standards allow common tools and common tools cost a lot less than full custom solutions. Check out the blog by Andrew Mandelbaum at NDI – http://www.demworks.org/blog/2012/04/how-xml-can-improve-transparency-and-workflows-legislatures.

For more information, please see the complete post.

April 30-May 2: Parliamentary Monitoring Organizations Leaders Conference on Parliamentary Transparency and Networking

A number of legislative information technologies and standards are being discussed this week at the 2012 Parliamentary Monitoring Organizations Leaders Conference on Parliamentary Transparency and Networking, being held 30 April-2 May 2012, in Washington, DC.

The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #pmo2012.

Click here for the live Webcast of the conference.

Collaborative notes are being taken of the conference, here using Titanpad and here using GoogleDocs.

Some key documents being discussed at the conference are:

• NDI and Sunlight Foundation, Parliamentary Transparency Pledge.
• IPU and UNDP. (2012). The global parliamentary report: The changing nature of parliamentary representation.
• IPU. (2006). Parliament and democracy in the twenty-first century: A guide to good practice.

Click here for detailed information about the conference.

Video and Other Resources Available for House Legislative Data and Transparency Conference

Video is now available for the House Legislative Data and Transparency Conference, held 2 February 2012, in Washington, DC. The conference was hosted by the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on House Administration.

Click here for slides from some of the presentations (scroll down).

The Twitter hashtag for the conference was #ldtc.

Presentations concerned metadata and dissemination standards and practices for U.S. federal legislative data, including open government data standards, XML markup, integrating multimedia resources into legislative data, and standards for evaluating the transparency of U.S. federal legislative data.

Speakers included Daniel Bennett of the e-Citizen Foundation, Tom Bruce of the Legal Information Institute, Daniel Schuman and Eric Mill of the Sunlight Foundation, Jim Harper of the Cato Institute, Joshua Tauberer of POPVOX and GovTrack, and Derek Willis of the New York Times.

Here are links to selected posts about the conference:

• Jim Harper, Helping the House Advance Data Transparency
• Ari Hershowitz, Roundup: House Legislative Data and Transparency
• David Moore, Liberate OpenGovData Now
• Daniel Schuman, Benchmarks for Measuring Success for Legislative Transparency
• Joshua Tauberer, Data Impact and Understandability (click here for slides)
• Derek Willis, On Legislative Data Transparency
• John Wonderlich, Bulk Data at the House Legislative Data Conference

If you know of other posts or resources about the conference, please feel free to mention them in the comments.

{NOTE: Updated 11 February 2012 to add link to Joshua Tauberer’s presentation.]

Harper on a Legislative Process Data Model and XML Markup for Representing Legislative Data Types

Jim Harper, Esq., of the Cato Institute has posted a data model of the U.S. federal legislative process and XML markup for representing major types of U.S. federal legislative information, in his post entitled Helping the House Advance Data Transparency, at the Cato@Liberty blog.

The post appears to summarize Mr. Harper’s presentation at the House Legislative Data and Transparency Conference, held 2 February 2012 in Washinton, DC.

Click here for video of the panel that includes Mr. Harper’s presentation.