Examples of Specialized Legal Metadata Adapted to the Digital Environment, from the CFR

Legal Information Institute Director Tom Bruce‘s and my new paper, entitled Examples of Specialized Legal Metadata Adapted to the Digital Environment, from the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations (click here for slides) was presented on June 14, 2011, at dg.o 2011: The 12th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research, at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Here is the abstract:

Among print-based U.S. legal information resources, specialized tools that link discrete types of metadata substantially improve the efficiency of legal research. Many of these tools could be of considerable utility in the electronic information environment. However, many such tools require thorough redesign in order to make them optimally usable by digital systems. This paper presents a case study of one such tool — the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations’ Parallel Table of Authorities and Rules, which links each statute to its corresponding regulations. Through examples of XML and RDF/OWL markup, the paper shows how such a tool might be adapted successfully to the electronic domain.

The discussion following the presentation concerned XML specifications that might be used for the digital PTOA, use cases for the digital PTOA, and approaches to automating the adaptation of the PTOA for the digital environment, including automated text analysis techniques such as those used by Professor Dr. Kincho H. Law and Dr. Gloria T. Lau of Stanford University’s Engineering Informatics Group.