Bulk Access to Law-Related Linked Data: LC & VIAF Name Authority Records and LC Subject Authority Records

Linked Data versions of Library of Congress name authority records and subject authority records are now available for bulk download from the Library of Congress Linked Data Service, according to Kevin Ford at Library of Congress.

In addition, VIAF, the Virtual International Authority File, now provides bulk access to Linked Data versions of name authority records for organizations, including government entities and business organizations, from more than 30 national or research libraries. VIAF data are also searchable through the VIAF Web user interface.

Together, these services provide bulk access to Linked Data versions of a very large number of authority records for names of government entities in many countries–names which play a prominent role in many kinds of legal data. Moreover, the Library of Congress Subject Authority records service provides access to a very large set of Linked Data versions of records for legal subjects from many different legal systems; the coverage provided by those records varies from legal system to legal system, but is often very broad and is in some instances comprehensive.

These Linked Data resources can be downloaded and incorporated into new or existing legal information systems that employ Linked Data technology. In addition, because each authority record in these data sets contains a unique URI and is publicly accessible on the Web, legal information systems that employ Linked Data technology can link out to relevant authority records at VIAF or the Library of Congress, as part of the development of the legal portion of the Semantic Web.

Click here for a list of additional law-related Linked Data resources.

HT @3windmills here and here

Ford: Law Classification Added to Library of Congress Linked Data Service

Kevin Ford of the Library of Congress has posted Law Classification Added to Library of Congress Linked Data Service, at In Custodia Legis.

Here are excerpts from the post:

The Library of Congress is pleased to make the K Class – Law Classification – and all its subclasses available as linked data from the LC Linked Data Service, ID.LOC.GOV. K Class joins the B, N, M, and Z Classes, which have been in beta release since June 2012. With about 2.2 million new resources added to ID.LOC.GOV, K Class is nearly eight times larger than the B, M, N, and Z Classes combined.[...]

Please explore the K Class for yourself at http://id.loc.gov/authorities/classification/K or all of the classes at http://id.loc.gov/authorities/classification. [...]

As always, your feedback is important and welcomed. [...] we are particularly interested in how the data available from ID.LOC.GOV is used and continue to encourage the submission of use cases describing how the community would like to apply or repurpose the LCC data. [...]

For more details, please see the complete post.

Click here for other law-related Linked Data resources.

HT @atweber

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

Bruce on the LII Legislative Metadata Model

Tom Bruce of the Legal Information Institute has posted Our Legislative Metadata Model, at Making Metasausage.

Excerpt:

Some months ago, I and some of my colleagues at the LII began to release a series of white papers that were written as part of the construction of a (mostly) comprehensive metadata model for Federal legislation. They are appearing as a series of blog posts in this blog. One which seemed more appropriate for VoxPopuLII – it had to do with metadata quality concerns that are not limited to legislation — was posted there yesterday. We’ll continue to adapt the white papers as blog posts and release them as Metasausage posts, but we thought that it was high time that we released full documentation of the model. Many of you have known of its existence for a while; we’ve been slow to release it because, well, we’re just overwhelmed with work.

The model is Linked-Data-friendly and designed to be highly extensible. We think it could serve as a reference model (by which I think I really mean “extensible scaffolding”) for a much more comprehensive metadata model for Federal legislation. As you’ll see when you read the documentation, we made no attempt to model things where we lacked domain expertise (appropriations and reconciliation being two), nor did we try to deal with the finer points of House and Senate rules when modeling process.

We’ll be interested in your reactions to it, and very, very interested in taking it further. Over the next month or so, we’ll actually build out what we’ve already put in the Open Metadata Registry into a full Linked Data representation online. [...]

The model was primarily done by myself, Diane Hillmann, John Joergensen, and Jon Phipps. [...]

Disclosure: I made small contributions to the model.

Click here for the LII Legislative Metadata Model documentation (in many formats).

For more details, please see the complete post.

HT @trbruce

Call for Papers: LVI 2013: Law via the Internet Conference

The call for papers and presentation proposals has been issued for LVI 2013: Law via the Internet Conference, to be held 26-27 September 2013 on the Channel Island of Jersey.

The conference Website does not seem to state the deadline for submitting papers or proposals. If you know the submission deadline, please feel free to tell us in the comments to this post.

[UPDATE 11 February 2013: The conference organizers now say the submission deadline is 31 March 2013.]

Papers are invited on the topics covered by any of the seven tracks in which the conference program is divided:

• E-Learning: distance, blended, open, mobile, gaming, MOOCing and more?
• Online legal information – starting from scratch
• Legal knowledge in the age of the semantic web
• Communicating our work: journals, blogs and other ways of publishing about open access
• Privacy v open government in legal publishing
• Emerging patterns of information access and usage
• Technological development and free access to law

The conference Twitter account is @JerseyLVI2013 and the conference hashtag is #lvi2013

For details about the tracks, please see the track Websites.

For more details about the conference, please see the conference Website.

Morley on Sheridan, Open Legislative Data, and Legislation.gov.uk

Video of Oliver Morley’s presentation last month at the Sprint 13 conference, concerning open data at The National Archives, including Legislation.gov.uk, is available.

This clip starts at the discussion of Legislation.gov.uk, the UK open legislation platform. The discussion covers John Sheridan‘s innovative work developing Legislation.gov.uk according to principles of open Linked Data, the new project to update the UK statute book by means of expert participation, a new platform that will allow UK Government personnel to edit legislation, and new tools that produce visualizations of the quantities of UK and EU statutes and regulations.

Click here for John Sheridan’s VoxPopuLII post about the technology of Legislation.gov.uk.

Click here for slides of John Sheridan’s recent presentation on Legislation as Data.

HT @johnlsheridan

Sheridan on Legislation as Data

John Sheridan of the National Archives gave a presentation entitled Legislation as Data, 25 January 2013, at the Open Data Institute in London.

Click here for the presentation slides.

Click here for archived Twitter tweets from the event, in .csv format.

The Twitter hashtag for the event was #odifridays

For posts about the presentation, please see the comments to this post.

HT @JeniT

[NOTE: Updated 31 January 2013 to add a link to the slides.]

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

Casellas on Linked Legal Data: A SKOS Vocabulary for the Code of Federal Regulations

Dr. Núria Casellas of the Legal Information Institute has posted Linked Legal Data: A SKOS Vocabulary for the Code of Federal Regulations, under review at Semantic Web Journal.

Here is the abstract:

This paper describes the application of Semantic Web and Linked Data techniques and principles to regulatory information for the development of a SKOS vocabulary for the Code of Federal Regulations (in particular of Title 21, Food and Drugs). The Code of Federal Regulations is the codification of the general and permanent enacted rules generated by executive departments and agencies of the Federal Government of the United States, a regulatory corpus of large size, varied subject-matter and structural complexity. The CFR SKOS vocabulary is developed using a bottom-up approach for the extraction of terminology from text based on a combination of syntactic analysis and lexico-syntactic pattern matching. Although the preliminary results are promising, several issues (a method for hierarchy cycle control, expert evaluation and control support, named entity reduction, and adjective and prepositional modifier trimming) require improvement and revision before it can be implemented for search and retrieval enhacement of regulatory materials published by the Legal Information Institute. The vocabulary is part of a larger Linked Legal Data project [described here and here], that aims at using Semantic Web technologies for the representation and management of legal data.

HT @ncasellas

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.