Casellas et al. on Linked Legal Data: Improving Access to Regulatory Information
From the post:
Dr. Núria Casellas of the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School, and colleagues, have posted Linked Legal Data: Improving Access to Regulatory Information, a poster presented at Bits on Our Mind (BOOM) 2012, held 4 April 2012 at the Cornell University Department of Computing and Information Science, in Ithaca, New York, USA.
Here are excerpts from the poster:
The application of Linked Open Data (LOD) principles to legal information (URI naming of resources, assertions about named relationships between resources or between resources and data values, and the possibility to easily extend, update and modify these relationships and resources) could offer better access and understanding of legal knowledge to individual citizens, businesses and government agencies and administrations, and allow sharing and reuse of legal information across applications, organizations and jurisdictions. […]
With this project, we will enhance access to the Code of Federal Regulations (a text with 96.5 million words in total; ~823MB XML file size) with an RDF dataset created with a number of semantic-search and retrieval applications and information extraction techniques based on the development and the reuse of RDF product taxonomies, the application of semantic matching algorithms between these materials and the CFR content (Syntactic and Semantic Mapping), the detection of product-related terms and relations (Vocabulary Extraction), obligations and product definitions (Definition and Obligations Extraction). […]
You know, lawyers always speculated if the “Avoid Probate” (for non-U.S. readers, a publication to help citizens avoid the use of lawyers for inheritance issues) were in fact shadow publications of the bar association to promote the use of lawyers.
You haven’t seen a legal mess until someone tries “self-help” in a legal context. Probably doubles if not triples the legal fees involved.
Still, this may be an interesting source of data for services for lawyers and foolhardy citizens.
I shudder though at the “sharing of legal information across jurisdictions.” In most of the U.S., a creditor can claim say a car where a mortgage is past due. Without going to court. In Louisiana, at least a number of years ago, there was another name for self-help repossession. It was called felony theft. Like I said, self-help when it comes to the law isn’t a good idea.