GPO & LII Partner on CFR XML

The U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO), the Legal Information Institute (LII) at Cornell University Law School, and the Cornell University Law Library have entered into a partnership to assess methods for making the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) available in XML.

According to GPO’s press release, the LII “will convert various titles into XML and place them on the university’s Web site for students to research. GPO and Cornell will apply lessons learned from this pilot project and share the information with members of the Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP) to find ways of providing the public openness to government documents.”

Tom Bruce, Co-founder and Director of the LII, stated that “[t]he LII will provide the technical expertise needed to create a high-value version of the CFR, with features that significantly extend its utility beyond current offerings.”

The release notes that “[t]he LII has long been known for its expertise in creating lawyer- and citizen-friendly versions of the United States Code from bulk data created by GPO in older formats.”

In December 2009 GPO began making the CFR available for bulk download in XML.

This partnership with GPO is the most recent of LII’s innovative legal information projects, which include:

• developing the Wex collaborative legal encyclopedia;
• hosting the LexCraft Wiki for sharing best practices for legal information systems; and
• preparing a Linked Data version of the CALI Taxonomy.

For more information, please see the press release.

HT @aallnet.