Click here to see titles with “law” in the subject field.

Click here to see titles with “contracts” in the subject field.

Click here to see titles with “trusts” in the subject fields.

Click here to see titles with “bankruptcy” in the subject fields.

HT @jeffubois & @freegovinfo.

According to consultant Tom Carlson, NIEM SAW is a tool for exploring and searching NIEM, an XML data interchange standard for US federal, state, and local government information, including law-related information.

SAW runs on a local computer. Its companion software, NIEM Wayfarer, is a Web-based version of the same search tool:

• Click here for NIEM Wayfarer for NIEM version 2.0;
• Click here for NIEM Wayfarer for NIEM version 2.1.

To get a sense of the kinds of data accessible via NIEM, click here to see results of a search of NIEM Wayfarer for NIEM version 2.1 for the topic “assault”.

Click here for more information on NIEM.

HT Tom Carlson.

Peter Jordan and Helen Lippell describe the role of metadata, including taxonomies, in re-designing the flagship government website, Directgov.

Elizabeth Marley describes the addition of subject and other indexing metadata at the UK Parliament, contributing to the internal databases and to services to the public on the Parliamentary website, and the operation of the thesauri and controlled vocabularies used in enriching Parliamentary content.

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.

A corpus called DutchParl is created which aims to contain all digitally available parliamentary documents written in the Dutch language. The first version of DutchParl contains documents from the parliaments of The Netherlands, Flanders and Belgium. The corpus is divided along three dimensions: per parliament, scanned or digital documents, written recordings of spoken text and others. The digital collection contains more than 800 million tokens, the scanned collection more than 1 billion. All documents are available as UTF-8 encoded XML files with extensive metadata in Dublin Core standard. The text itself is divided into pages which are divided into paragraphs. Every document, page and paragraph has a unique URN which resolves to a web page. Every page element in the XML files is connected to a facsimile image of that page in PDF or JPEG format. We created a viewer in which both versions can be inspected simultaneously. The corpus is available for download in several formats. The corpus can be used for corpus-linguistic and political science research, and is suitable for performing scalability tests for XML information systems.

Thanks to Professor Dr. Marx for this information.

We address the problem of publishing parliamentary proceedings in a digital sustainable manner. We give an extensive requirements analysis, and based on that propose a uniform XML format. We evaluated our approach by collecting and automatically processing proceedings from six parliaments spanning almost 200 years in total. Most of this data is real legacy data consisting of scanned and OCRed documents. The approach scales very well and produces high quality data.

All documents are transformed into UTF-8 encoded XML files with extensive metadata in Dublin Core Standard. The text itself is divided into pages which are divided into paragraphs. Every document, page, and paragraph has a unique URN which resolves to a Web page. Every page element in the XML files is connected to a facsimile image of that page in PDF or JPEG format. We created a viewer in which both versions can be inspected simultaneously. A search engine for the complete collection is available online.

The post describes his scanning methods, and also gives a detailed example of the Dublin Core metadata, marked up in RDF, used to describe the digital files. The post also reflects input from Staffan Malmgren, creator of the Swedish free access to law service lagen.nu.

Prevailing citation practice in law journals is to use uniform resource locators (URLs) when citing electronic sources. Digital object identifiers (DOIs) provide a more reliable and robust mechanism for citing digital, scholarly articles. This study examines to what extent DOIs exist but are not used in law journal citations. Citations to scholarly articles from twenty-five randomly-selected articles appearing in the 2008-2009 volumes of four major law journals (Harvard Law Review, Columbia Law Review, Yale Law Journal, and University of Pennsylvania Law Review) were checked for existing DOIs using CrossRef’s Simple Text Query form. This resulted in 394 citations that could have had DOIs, but did not. This non-trivial number suggests that law journal editors and librarians should consider adding DOIs to citations. For journals that publish exclusively online or are interdisciplinary, assigning DOIs to their own articles may be a prudent measure to better ensure long-term digital access and citation by scholars in other fields.

Mr. Keele’s paper is a co-recipient of the 2010 AALL / LexisNexis Call for Papers Student Division Award.

The Twitter hashtags for the event are #citability and #dccodeathon.

Click here to see video of the event on ustream.

Among the applications to be written at the codeathon are resolvers for converting legal resource URNs conforming to the URN:LEX standard, to URIs conforming to the Citability standard.

Click here for the full text of the URN:LEX standard.

Click here for the full text of the Citability standard, entitled Citable Documents Specification.

For more information, please see the codeathon announcement.

“RT @bboissin A (very) simple urn:lex resolver for a subset of the #AN and #Senat documents: http://urnlex.appspot.com/“

HT @cottinstef & @regardscitoyens.

The new version has been published by Institute of Legal Information Theory and Techniques of the Italian National Research Council (ITTIG/CNR); Italy, National Centre for ICT in Public Administration (CNIPA); Brazil, Federal Senate, IT Department (PRODASEN); and Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute (LII).

The contacts for the draft are Professor Enrico Francesconi & Pierluigi Spinosa, both of ITTIG/CNR, and Caterina Lupo of CNIPA.

According to the new version, “The purpose of the ‘lex’ namespace is to assign an unequivocal identifier, in standard format, to documents that are sources of law.”

Here are some key differences between the new version and the previous version (dated 30 October 2009):

• The former term “National Registrar” has been changed to “Registrar” because that role may pertain to jurisdictions other than national jurisdictions;
• A new “Definitions” section has been added, providing definitions for the terms “Source of Law” and “Registrar”;
• The definition of “Source of Law” provides that that term denotes “anything that can be conceived of as the originator of legal rules,” presumably including constitutions; treaties and other international agreements; contracts; conveyancing instruments; and proposed legislation. Further, other parts of the new version expressly refer to:
• constitutions (see, e.g., the example of the 1988 Brazilian Constitution in section 4.4),
• treaties (see, e.g., section 4.5),
• proposed legislation (see, e.g., the example of a proposition from the Sénat de France in Section 4.4), and
• conveyancing instruments (see, e.g., the example of the Free Software Foundation’s General Public License in Section 4.4);
• The element formerly named “country” is now named “jurisdiction”, because that element may refer to national or international jurisdictions;
• The syntax of the “partition-id” element has been changed, such that the former character “#” has been replaced by “~”, in order to avoid resolution and retrieval problems arising from the fact that when a URN is resolved, a “#” character in the URN will not be transmitted to the server.

Full disclosure: I submitted comments respecting proposed revisions to the former version of URN:LEX, and some of my comments were incorporated into the new version. I am most grateful to Professor Francesconi and his colleagues for considering the comments offered and for incorporating many of those comments into the new version.

URN:LEX is one of the metadata standards being used in conjunction with the Law.gov legal open government data project.

Legal information systems developers are sharing examples of URN:LEX identifiers, and discussing how to use URN:LEX, on LexCraft, the wiki for sharing best practices in legal information systems development, hosted by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law School. To participate in this discussion, or to add further examples, if you’re not already a LexCraft member, one need only register as a LexCraft member. Registration is free. Click here to register on LexCraft.

HT Professor Enrico Francesconi.

Metalex is an interchange format for legal XML schemas and document-type definitions.

For more information, and for links to other Metalex documents, please see the Metalex Website.

Click here for background on the Law.gov project. Thanks to LII Director Tom Bruce for graciously hosting this event.

Among the applications to be written at the codeathon are resolvers for converting legal resource URNs conforming to the URN:LEX standard, to URIs conforming to the Citability standard.

Click here for the full text of the URN:LEX standard.

Click here for the full text of the Citability standard, entitled Citable Documents Specification.

For more information, please see the codeathon announcement.

Such distribution could enable the creation of free and open registries of metadata for court records, similar to the many OAI-PMH-compliant free and open registries for metadata describing journal articles, books, and dissertations, such as OAIster.

The application will be discussed at the Cornell Law.gov Workshop, an invitation-only meeting to be held in connection with the Law.gov legal open government data project, on 22-23 March 2010 at the LII.

The application is made available on the LII’s LexCraft Wiki, where developers of digital law collections share technical information and advice.

For more information, please see the OAI4Courts application page.

In this new post, Mr. Charbonneau presents a model — called the Collaborative Document Management Framework (CDMF) — of the digital legal information ecosystem. Further, he envisions a range of new platforms and tools enabling users of electronic legal information to collaborate:

• Open online legal communities that facilitate information sharing among users and mashups of primary and secondary legal resources;
• Non-proprietary, automated citators, featuring citations associated with stable hyperlinks for online legal resources; these citations and hyperlinks would be designed to be easily grabbed and shared by users, and to be dynamically updated as legal resources are revised or invalidated;
• Transparent usage statistics, so that users of those communities can see how popular particular resources are;
• Ranking of legal information resources, determined by users’ votes;
• Personalized, customizable user interfaces;
• Display of automatically generated suggestions of relevant secondary sources, when a user views a primary legal resource;
• Tools enabling users to annotate primary sources as they read; and
• Crowdsourced registries of metadata for legal resources.

Mr. Charbonneau developed many of these ideas in collaboration with Professor Daniel Poulin and his colleagues at CanLII.

Mr. Charbonneau expands on these ideas in his master’s thesis and his paper at the 2009 Law via the Internet Conference (click here for slides).

Mr. Charbonneau’s post will be of interest to all persons — including administrators and developers of legal information systems, and law librarians — exploring ways to augment the role that users play in online legal information systems.

Mr. Mokanov is Deputy Director of LexUM, the publisher of CanLII, the Canadian Legal Information Institute.

Mr. Mokanov’s post describes the origins of the neutral standard, its benefits, its implementation by CanLII, and its widespread adoption. The post also discusses the development of and workflow for CanLII’s RefLex online citator.

Because the post discusses technical, policy, and user issues, the post should be of interest to legal information systems administrators and developers, policy advocates, legal information professionals, and all users of CanLII.

The panelists will be:

• John Joergensen, creator of the Rutgers Camden Law Library Digital Collections and blogger at The Hacked Librarian; and
• Michelle Ayers of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals Library.

The panelists will discuss the following topics:

• “Reasons to digitize;
• Barriers to digitizing;
• Importance of metadata;
• Possible pitfalls involved in a digitization project and how to avoid;
• Examples of library digital projects in government and academia;
• Possible applications in Firm libraries.”

For more information, please see the announcement.

• In Harvesting Congressional Documents, Joergensen describes an automated method (using PERL) for gathering U.S. federal legislative documents from the U.S. GPO’s FDsys content management system;
• In Embedded Metadata Please, Joergensen explains why incorporating descriptive metadata into digital legal documents themselves is essential for enabling long term preservation of those documents; and
• In Embedded Metadata, Part Deux: Authentication, Joergensen discusses how the embedding of metadata in digital legal documents affects the authentication of those documents.

For more information, please see the announcement posted to LAW-LIB.

“User generated content and collaboration, also called « Web 2.0 », offer new possibilities in the context of a thriving and open Internet. Digital environments that employ these production mechanisms allow user communities to enrich a virtual space. Using a constructivist approach, we explore how collaboration can serve the users of an open access database of court rulings, namely the Canadian Legal Information Institute’s website (www.CanLII.org). Collaboration is set within a framework that we name the « Collaboration Framework ». There are two classes of objects, users and documents, that interact following four relationships : links between documents, exchanges between users, writing (from users to documents) and consumption (from documents to users). In turn, we can better understand how collaboration functions, given a specific class of documents. Following an analysis of court rulings as a system of documents and an illustration of user needs in civil society, the Collaboration Framework is applied to an open access database of court rulings in order to determine how users can enrich the system’s content. This thesis was submitted to the ‘Faculté des études supérieures’ of the ‘Université de Montréal’ for the LL.M. degree, Information Technology Law option.”

HT @iinek.

In my view, the U.S. market for high-end computer-assisted legal research (CALR) currently requires at least the following systems features:

• complete and current collections of primary law;
• large collections of quality secondary legal resources;
• retrieval systems that can search across multiple primary and secondary legal resource databases; and
• specialized and current descriptive metadata applied to document segments, especially citator systems and knowledge representation for points of law.

This high-end market appears to be shrinking, for several reasons:

• clients are forcing cost reductions;
• the low-end legal research market (which typically offers only “plain-vanilla” retrieval of primary legal documents containing little if any descriptive metadata) is offering better metadata (currently citators and, probably before long, subject access to whole documents, if not segments); and
• many lawyers and paralegals appear to be learning to live with the features offered by low-end systems, according to recent survey evidence, such as that from the latest ABA Legal Technology Survey Report.

Google’s U.S. CALR strategy so far seems to have been to engage with this sector from the bottom up. Google first developed its presence in the low-end market by indexing the free case law available on the Web. This week, it has advanced “up market” by integrating that primary legal resource retrieval system with the secondary legal resource retrieval systems of Google Scholar and Google Book Search.

I think that, if Google really wants to compete for the high-end market, its next steps would be:

• to fill the holes in the primary legal resource collections that it indexes (perhaps by offering incentives to organizations that publish primary legal resources free of charge on the Web);
• to build an effective, automated legal citator, as Andrew Plumb-Larrick discusses in his fine post today; and
• to develop a good quality, automated knowledge representation system to provide subject access to individual primary legal documents (i.e., individual statutes, cases, and regulations).

An interesting white paper published earlier this year by Tim O’Reilly & John Battelle may shed light on Google’s next steps. That paper notes Google’s aptitude for developing sophisticated automatic metadata creation systems, such as the one underlying Google Mobile App, that incorporate improvements drawn from the study of large numbers of user searches. This aptitude suggests that Google probably won’t need very long to build a good quality automatic legal citator and subject indexing system, if it has a mind to. If Google takes those further steps, then I think it could take a big share of the high-end CALR market. At the very least, its efforts, coupled with Bloomberg’s, should result in increased competition, lower prices, and more innovation yielding better retrieval tools for users in the U.S. CALR sector. (On the obstacles to innovation in the U.S. CALR sector, see Professor Viktor Mayer-Schönberger’s recent post on VoxPopuLII.)

Google’s ongoing development of its legal research system could also yield additional benefits for the legal community. The O’Reilly-Battelle white paper notes Google’s skill at identifying implicit structures in large data sets. These implicit structures can complement express, formal descriptive metadata, such as, in the legal realm, West’s Key Number System, Lexis’s Headnotes, or Bloomberg’s Points of Law. One great potential benefit for the legal community in Google’s development of its legal research system, is the (automated) discovery of previously unknown, implicit structures in primary and secondary legal information. Some legal scholars are already exploring this area by using techniques developed in connection with the study of complex adaptive systems. I think Google may also have important contributions to make to this area of research, particularly if it chooses to publish its research findings.

Google Scholar now indexes selected judicial decisions and patents, metadata for which are available on the Internet. Note the “How Cited” feature.

Andrew Plumb-Larrick has written a fine post describing the new system.

Carole Levitt gathers much valuable commentary about the new system here. HT @montserratlj.

Greg Lambert published a useful list of links about the system, and a fine post commenting on it.

HT @justia

Project events are announced on JIPS’s LAWgical blog. The project team communicates on the IMO email listserv, and also holds regular Skype conference calls. The first such call was held on 1 October 2009; a recording and a transcript of the call are available here. The next Skype conference call will be held on 5 November 2009; please see details here.

JurMeta seems to have elements in common with other recent legal metadata projects, including the UK National Archives’ Office of Public Sector Information (OPSI)’s Single Legislation Service (SLS) and law-related projects with TSO (see details from Dr. John L. Sheridan via Dr. Adam Wyner here and here); and Cornell Legal Information Institute’s OAI4Courts project.

We wish the project team the best of success with JurMeta, and we look forward to following the progress of this exciting and innovative project.

[This post was last updated 12 June 2010.]