The California Law Hackathon — an effort to build software and tools to improve access to California legislation, on the free Web — will be held 17 September 2011. Physical locations for the Hackathon, to date, are Berkeley, California, at the Maplight Foundation, and Denver, Colorado, at the Denver Open Media Foundation. Remote online participationRead… Read more »
Legislative XML for the Semantic Web: Principles, Models, Standards for Document Management (Springer 2011), a collection of scholarly articles on the use of XML and Semantic Web technologies in connection with legislative information systems, has been published. The volume is edited by Professor Dr. Giovanni Sartor of Università di Bologna CIRSFID; Professor Dr. Monica PalmiraniRead… Read more »
Courtney Minick, Esq., of Justia has posted Universal Citation for State Codes, on the VoxPopuLII Blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School. Tim Stanley of Justia is a member of our community. In this post, Ms. Minick criticizes traditional U.S. legal citation standards for reinforcing major commercial publishers’ dominant positionsRead… Read more »
At least three law-related application programming interfaces (APIs) were released this summer by Code for America. According to a recent post by Dan Melton on the Code for America site, development of these APIs was funded in whole or in part by a Google Summer of Code grant. The new law-related Code for America APIsRead… Read more »
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 »
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 »
Sean McGrath of Proplyon — and a member of our community — has launched a new legal technology project: The NIEM EDemocracy Initiative (NEI). The goal of NEI appears to be to develop “technological standards based on the” U.S. National Information Exchange Model (NIEM), as applied particularly to law-related e-government functions. Mr. McGrath’s post entitledRead… Read more »
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 »
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.
David Moore of the Participatory Politics Foundation (PPF) — and a member of our community — discusses the technology, principles, and development of OpenGovernment.org — his new free, open, citizen engagement and transparency service for U.S. state legislation — in my new post at Slaw.ca, entitled “Sites of Real Engagement”: OpenGovernment.org Opens Up State Legislation.Read… Read more »