Zimmermann on jurMeta: A New Metadata Initiative for Legal Documents

Dipl.-Jur. Felix Zimmermann of kjur.de has posted jurMeta – New Metadata Initiative for Legal Documents, on the VoxPopuLII Blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School.

Mr. Zimmermann’s post describes jurMeta, an innovative new metadata standard — still in development — for German-language legal resources. He relates how he and his collaborators — Andreas Bock and Ralf Zosel — identified the need for a metadata standard — which German government entities, as well as private sector publishers, could employ — to enable automatic metadata extraction from, and automatic annotation of, digital legal documents, and automatic linking of such documents across platforms. He discusses their initial outline of such a standard in a 2009 conference presentation. He identifies a number of innovative free German-language legal Web 2.0 services now available. He offers an exciting use case, involving seamless linking of resources among legal Web 2.0 services. He then provides examples of the tags — which are based on Dublin Core terms — employed in the standard, in HTML and XML markup. He concludes by discussing the possibility of developing a microformat for the standard and of making the standard available in RDF.

Mr. Zimmermann’s post recalls other current legal informatics projects that apply Dublin Core metadata, including:

• The LII‘s OAI4Courts and Suggested Metadata Practices for Legislation and Regulations;
• John Joergensen‘s metadata for legislative documents and law journal articles; and
• Prof. Dr. Maarten Marx‘s metadata for parliamentary documents.

Mr. Zimmermann’s post also brings to mind Olivier Charbonneau‘s recent proposal for an automatic linking system between legal Web 2.0 services, and Ivan Mokanov‘s recent description of CanLII’s partial implementation of such a system.

Mr. Zimmermann’s post will be of interest to all those who publish law in digital formats, those developing systems for the reuse of legal information, the legal Web 2.0 community, and participants in the legal open government data movement.