URN:LEX: New Version 06 Available

A new version 06 of the URN:LEX standard for legal identifiers has been posted. The new version is dated 2 April 2012, and expires 4 October 2012.

The new version has been published by Institute of Legal Information Theory and Techniques of the Italian National Research Council (ITTIG/CNR); Italy, National Centre for ICT in Public Administration (CNIPA) [now DigitPA]; Brazil, Federal Senate, IT Department (PRODASEN); and the Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law School (LII).

The contacts for the draft are Professor Dr. Enrico Francesconi & Pierluigi Spinosa, both of ITTIG/CNR, and Caterina Lupo of CNIPA/DigitPA.

According to Professor Francesconi, the new version contains the following new features:

An http-based syntax of the LEX identifier is included (Appendix D) to cope with different requirements in legal information management, as for example the need of having an identifier compliant with the Linked Data principles.

According to the new version:

The purpose of the “lex” namespace is to assign an unequivocal identifier, in standard format, to documents that are sources of law. To the extent of this namespace, “sources of law” include any legal document within the domain of legislation, case law and administrative acts or regulations; moreover potential “sources of law” (acts under the process of law formation, as bills) are included as well. Therefore “legal doctrine” is explicitly not covered.

The authors have also developed a URN schema handler which can be used in conjunction with URN:LEX.

HT Professor Francesconi.

European Legislation Identifier: Document and Slides

John Dann of the Luxembourg Service Central de Législation has kindly given his permission for us to post the following documents related to the proposed European Legislation Identifier (ELI) standard:

• European Legislation Identifier, EU Council Document no. 17554/11;
• John Dann’s December 2011 slide presentation about the European Legislation Identifier.

The EU Council Document summarizes the European Legislation Identifier in the following way:

We propose a European Legislation Identifier (ELI) scheme of URI Templates to encourage and promote the use of HTTP URIs for legislation in Europe’s Official Gazettes.

ELI needs to be flexible enough to enable countries to design high quality URIs for their own legislation but also enable a coherent European wide approach.

ELI is a set of components for creating URI Templates for legislation in Europe. These components can be used to make high quality URIs supported by a formal technical description.

To aid adoption of ELI we propose a generic ELI URI Template as Best Practice.

For more information, please see EU Council Document no. 17554/11 or John Dann’s slide presentation.

Many thanks to John Dann for agreeing to make these resources available to the public.

European Legislation Identifier

[UPDATE 20 March 2012:] John Dann of the Luxembourg Service Central de Législation has kindly given his permission for us to post the following documents related to the proposed European Legislation Identifier (ELI) standard:

• European Legislation Identifier, EU Council Document no. 17554/11;
• John Dann’s December 2011 slide presentation about the European Legislation Identifier.

In December 2011, metadata describing a document about a European Legislation Identifier (ELI), no. 17554/11 , was posted on the EU official document register, but the full text of the document itself was not made public.

John Sheridan of the National Archives (UK) kindly made me aware of this document.

If anyone has this document, would you be willing to post it publicly?

If that is not possible, would anyone who has the document be willing to describe its contents?

There is considerable interest in this document in the legal informatics community, particularly since new efforts, such as OASIS LegalDocumentML, are underway to harmonize legislative information systems across national boundaries.

Thank you!

Leibniz Center Publishes All Dutch National Statutes and Regulations on Free Web in XML and RDF

The Leibniz Center for Law at the University of Amsterdam announced yesterday that it has published all Dutch national statutes and regulations, free on the Web, in CEN MetaLex XML and RDF Linked Data, at The MetaLex Document Server.

According to Dr. Rinke Hoekstra, the database also includes “the body of regulations that govern the entire kingdom of The Netherlands (i.e. the former Dutch Antilles and Aruba).”

The technology underlying the service is explained in Dr. Hoekstra’s recent presentation, The MetaLex Document Server – Legal Documents as Versioned Linked Data.

According to Dr. Hoekstra, a SPARQL endpoint for the Linked Data is available at http:doc.metalex.eu:8000/sparql .

For more information, please see the announcement, or contact Dr. Hoekstra.

HT @radboud and @rinkehoekstra.

Hoekstra on The MetaLex Document Server: Legal Documents as Versioned Linked Data

Dr. Rinke Hoekstra of the University of Amsterdam’s Leibniz Center for Law has posted slides of a presentation entitled The MetaLex Document Server: Legal Documents as Versioned Linked Data.

The slides describe an approach in which regulations from the Wetten.nl site were processed to enable improved public access, re-use, and inclusion of data in the Semantic Web. Regulations were marked up in CEN MetaLex XML format; persistent, “Cool” URIs — generated from Juriconnect URNs — were added to enable version control and transparency; annotations were automatically added to the regulations and encoded in RDF as Linked Data; and the content was made available via a RESTful API.

For more information, please see the slides.

HT @RinkeHoekstra.

LegisLink: Simplified Human-Readable URLs for Legislative Citations

LegisLink is a Web service that establishes “human-readable web address[es] that link[] directly to legislation and sublevels within legislation for any jurisdiction.”

“When linkable, LegisLink directly connects to the official website.
When not linkable, LegisLink connects reusing the official document.”

LegisLink is organized by Joe Carmel, former IT manager for the U.S. Congress [the U.S. federal legislature], and a pioneer in the development of XML for legislation.

LegisLink hosts a Wiki, where:

• “Users define LegisLink formats for software developers to create.
• Developers write code to provide the results.
• There’s also some discussion topics, defining of formats, and general idea swapping.”

LegisLink currently has URLs established for legislation from:

• the U.S. Congress;
• New Zealand; and
• the U.S. State of Colorado.

LegisLink is developed by volunteers. LegisLink seeks additional contributors to develop URLs for more jurisdictions, and to create additional services. LegisLink also seeks additional participants to use and test the LegisLink URLs that have already been developed.

LegisLink seems related to a number of recent legal informatics developments, including law-related Linked Data projects, and the URN:LEX URI standard for legal information.

For more information, please see the LegisLink Website.

LC Subject Headings Now Available in SKOS

The Library of Congress has released a machine-readable version of the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) (URL corrected 10 August 2011], using SKOS as a data model. LCSH is important for legal knowledge representation in common law jurisdictions, because it is a very widely used controlled subject vocabulary in library catalogs in those jurisdictions. This release is an example of LC’s follow-through on plans announced last year in Deanna Marcum’s response to the Future of Bibliographic Control report.

The free public release of machine-readable LCSH is welcome news, for at least two reasons. First, it will enable developers to create applications for, among other things, automated metadata creation for legal resources. Second, its resolvable URIs, that comply with Representational State Transfer (REST) principles, for LCSH as a whole and for each individual record, enable use for Linked Data and Semantic Web purposes. Here’s an example of visualized linked data, for the heading “Security (Law)” (click on the “Visualize” tab).

One shortcoming of this release is that many, if not all, of the records lack corresponding classification numbers. As a result, this new LCSH data set can’t be used directly to derive LCSH from classification numbers (or vice versa). Hopefully class numbers will be included in a future release.

HT to Roy Tennant.

[Updated 15 November 2011 to revise links.]