Posts By Rob Richards

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 theRead… Read more »

Casellas on Legal Ontology Engineering

Dr. Núria Casellas of the Legal Information Institute has published Legal Ontology Engineering: Methodologies, Modelling Trends, and the Ontology of Professional Judicial Knowledge (Springer, 2011) (Law, Governance and Technology Series ; Vol. 3). Here is the publisher’s description: Enabling information interoperability, fostering legal knowledge usability and reuse, enhancing legal information search, in short, formalizing theRead… Read more »

RESTful API for California Legislation

Grant Vergottini of Xcential Group has released an unofficial RESTful Application Programming Interface (API) for California legislation, according to a post by Ari Hershowitz of Tabulaw, and a member of our community. Specifications for the API are available here and here. The publication of the specifications for Tthis API is the first product of Mr.Read… Read more »

New Research on the Sustainability of Free Access to Law Initiatives

Isabelle Moncion of Lexum and Mariya Badeva-Bright of the African Legal Information Institute (AfricanLII), have posted Reaching Sustainability of Free Access to Law Initiatives, on the VoxPopuLII Blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School. In this post, the authors summarize the key findings of the recently completed “Free Access toRead… Read more »

New: Bulk Access to XML Version of Michigan Compiled Laws, by Michael Bommarito

Michael J. Bommarito II of Systematic Global Macro and Computational Legal Studies has posted an XML version of Michigan Compiled Laws — the official codification of Michigan legislation — for bulk download. According to his post, Mr. Bommarito also “improved the underlying data [of the code] by adding tags and correcting indentation as best asRead… Read more »

Government Agency Names and Statutes as Linked Data, via LC Name Authority File

The Library of Congress has made available the LC Name Authority File as Linked Data. The data are available in several formats, including RDF/XML, N-Triples, and JSON. Of particular interest to the legal informatics community is the fact that the Linked Data version of the LC Name Authority File includes records for names of veryRead… Read more »

Project IMPACT: Two New Reports

Two new reports were issued in June 2011 by the EU-funded Project IMPACT : Integrated Method for Policy Making Using Argument Modelling and Computer Assisted Text Analysis: A report on the Argument Analysis, Tracking and Visualisation tool (AVT) (specifically, a report “describ[ing] the requirements analysis and specification, as well as the construction plan” for thisRead… Read more »

Federal Register API Now Available

An application programming interface (API) is now available for Federal Register data from FederalRegister.gov (also known as Federal Register 2.0), according to a 1 August 2011 post by Michael White of the Office of the Federal Register — and a member of our community — on the OFR Blog. According to the post, the APIRead… Read more »

Hershowitz: A Hackathon to Recode California’s Laws

Ari Hershowitz of Tabulaw — and a member of our community — is proposing “a hackathon to create a new, open website for California’s laws and legislation,” using the SQL files available at http://leginfo.ca.gov/. Mr. Hershowitz says this effort is inspired by Waldo Jaquith‘s The State Decoded project.