Applications invited for LEX Summer School 2013: Managing Legal Resources in the Semantic Web

Applications are invited for LEX Summer School 2013: Managing Legal Resources in the Semantic Web, to be held 2-7 September 2013 in Ravenna, Italy.

The summer school will be followed by the Akoma Ntoso Developers Workshop, 9-10 September 2013, in Ravenna.

Here is the description:

The school aims at providing knowledge of the most significant ICT standards emerging for legislation, judiciary, parliamentary and administrative documents. The course provides understanding of their impact in the different phases of the legislative and administrative process, awareness of the tools based on legal XML standards and of their constellations, and the ability to participate in the drafting and use of standard-compliant documents throughout law-making process. In particular we would like to create consciousness in the stakeholders in the legal domain about the benefits and the possibilities provided by the correct usage of Semantic Web technologies such as XML standards, ontologies, natural language processing techniques applied to legal texts, legal knowledge modelling and reasoning tools.

This edition of the LeX Summer School is organized in two courses:

• A Basic Course providing an introduction to XML web technologies and to basic technologies for drafting and managing standard-compliant legislative and legal documents;
• An Advanced Course providing in-depth analysis of the higher levels of Semantic Web technologies and of their application to the legal domain: modelling of modifications, procedures and legal knowledge;
• A workshop of two days for “Akoma Ntoso Tool Developers” focused on the technical issues.

LeX is an intensive 6-day, 8-hour-a-day program, that requires participants’ total dedication and intellectual commitment.

The program’s learning process assists participants to develop knowledge, skills and capabilities in using and managing shared and interoperable standards for legislative document enabling access, communication, processing, modelling, representing and integration of legislation through IT technologies, in an open and cooperative framework.

Teaching Objectives

Good management of legal documents involves at least six aspects:

• Drafting methods, to improve the language and structure of legislative texts;
• Legal XML standards, to improve the accessibility and interoperability of legal resources;
• Legal ontologies, to capture legal metadata and legal semantics;
• Legal Knowledge extraction using natural language techniques;
• Formal representation of legal contents, to support legal reasoning and argumentation;
• Workflow models, to cope with the lifecycle of legal documents.

The summer school will address all of these aspects, through multi- and interdisciplinary competences. It will provide and integrated approach to the management of legal documentation, as a core aspect of legislative and administrative innovation.

Target Group

We seek applicants who are interested in legal drafting and electronic management of legal resources and who plan to work in this area in the public administration, private sector or research fields.

LEX is designed primarily for officers of legislative bodies and other normative authorities (at international, national, regional and local levels), but it addresses also to drafters of normative texts in the private sector, editors, publishers, documentalists dealing with legal sources, experts in the electronic management of legal texts, students and researchers working in legal informatics and le’gislation studies.

For the technical people and for the tool developers the “Akoma Ntoso Tool Devs” workshop is a great occasion of networking.

HT Professor Dr. Monica Palmirani

GitLaw in Germany: Deutsche Bundesgesetze- und verordnungen im Markdown auf GitHub = German Federal Laws and Regulations in Markdown on GitHub

German federal laws and regulations appear to have been marked up in Markdown format and placed on GitHub, at https://github.com/bundestag/gesetze#german-federal-laws-and-regulations.

According to the project’s ReadMe, “The source is the XML version of the laws from www.gesetze-im-internet.de “

Scrapers and other tools associated with this project appear to be on GitHub at https://github.com/bundestag/gesetze-tools.

The project seems consistent with the recent trend commonly called GitLaw.

For details on updates and other issues, please see the project’s ReadMe.

The names of the personnel on this project are unknown. The Twitter account associated with this project appears to be @bundesgit.

HT @newsycombinator and @sclopit.

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.

Voelker on GitHub for Laws and Legal Documents

Abe Voelker of the Wisconsin Court System has posted GitLaw: GitHub for Laws and Legal Documents – a Tourniquet for American Liberty, at his blog.

In this post, Mr. Voelker advocates creating a version-control and version-tracking system for U.S. federal legislation using Git version tracking software.

Mr. Voelker also endorses the creation of “a new markup language for legal doc[ument]s that would work similar[ly] to Markdown.” As a possible model he cites Fountain, “a markup syntax for screenplays.” He rejects RDF and XML formats for legislation because they are “not very readable.”

Mr. Voelker observes that sharing a common legislative format at the local, state, national, and international levels would yield benefits.

Mr. Voelker argues that using a Git-based standard format for personal legal documents, such as wills and powers of attorney, would benefit consumers by improving security for those documents, and by allowing consumers to use standard forms and avoid hiring lawyers to advise on legal document preparation.

Mr. Voelker also speculates that use of Git-based legal document standards might help consumers feel more comfortable with the law, and might “inspir[e] a move to more plain English legal wording.”

Most of these issues appear to have been discussed recently, or are the subject of current projects and meetings, but none of that discussion or activity is cited or linked to in Mr. Voelker’s post. I’ve described those discussions and activities in this post.

In the comments to that post, please feel free to identify other relevant discussions, activities, or resources that I’ve overlooked.

HT @hackernewsbot.

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.

May 19 International Legislative Hackathon

The International Legislative Unhackathon will be held 19 May 2012 at the University of California, Hastings College of Law, in San Francisco, California, USA.

The event is being organized by Ari Hershowitz of Tabulaw.

Here is the text of the event announcement:

With a little bit of mark-up, we can transform access to law and access to justice worldwide. Government transparency is missing an essential tool: transparent laws and legal structures.

This event aims to provide the tools for governments and citizens worldwide to add structured data to laws, and thereby make the laws more transparent, and lawmakers more accountable.

Launch events will be held at UC Hastings and at Stanford.

We welcome participants from around the world to host your own local event. We suggest the following elements for your event:

1. An Ignite Talk on the importance of structured data for open government.

2. Select a few pieces of legislation to mark up using a developing international XML standard for legislation.

3. Marking up the legislation with the goal of having all countries’ constitutions in XML, and perhaps also selected open government laws.

We are working now on an event website. Share your thoughts here (Eventbrite) or on the wiki we have set up for the occasion: http://code.google.com/p/legal-hack/

Email event organizers for access to the wiki.

For more information, please see the event Website.

HT Pieter Gunst.

First Post about the Upcoming International Legislative Open Standards Hackathon

Grant Vergottini of Xcential Group has posted International Open Standards Hackathon, on his Legix.info blog.

Here is an excerpt of the post:

To further promote and to publicize Akoma Ntoso, I am working with Ari Hershowitz @arihersh to stage an international hackathon within the next few months. The idea is to provide an event for people that will demystify XML and Akoma Ntoso [...] by providing a really easy way for anyone to create a document using the proposed standard. Our goal will be to collect a world’s worth of legislative samples. This could be an important step towards building a library that stitches together all the world’s laws and regulations in an open and transparent way.

We’re currently seeking sponsors, participants, and venues for this hackathon. The interest we have found so far has been quite amazing. If you are interested in helping us make this event a success, please let either Ari or me know.

For more information, please see the complete post.