Strengthening our legal data infrastructure by Amanda Smith.
Amanda recounts an effort between the Open Data Institute (ODI) and Thomas Reuters to improve access to legal data.
From the post:
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Paving the way for a more open legal sector: discovery workshopIn September 2016, Thomson Reuters and the ODI gathered publishers of legal data, policy makers, law firms, researchers, startups and others working in the sector for a discovery workshop. Its aims were to explore important data types that exist within the sector, and map where they sit on the data spectrum, discuss how they flow between users and explore the opportunities that taking a more open approach could bring.
The notes from the workshop explore current mechanisms for collecting, managing and publishing data, benefits of wider access and barriers to use. There are certain questions that remain unanswered – for example, who owns the copyright for data collected in court. The notes are open for comments, and we invite the community to share their thoughts on these questions, the data types discussed, how to make them more open and what we might have missed.
Strengthening data infrastructure in the legal sector: next steps
Following this workshop we are working in partnership with Thomson Reuters to explore data infrastructure – datasets, technologies and processes and organisations that maintain them – in the legal sector, to inform a paper to be published later in the year. The paper will focus on case law, legislation and existing open data that could be better used by the sector.
The Ministry of Justice have also started their own data discovery project, which the ODI have been contributing to. You can keep up to date on their progress by following the MOJ Digital and Technology blog and we recommend reading their data principles.
Get involved
We are looking to the legal and data communities to contribute opinion pieces and case studies to the paper on data infrastructure for the legal sector. If you would like to get involved, contact us.
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Encouraging news, especially for those interested in building value-added tools on top of data that is made available publicly. At least they can avoid the cost of collecting data already collected by others.
Take the opportunity to comment on the notes and participate as you are able.
If you think you have seen use cases for topic maps before, consider that the Code of Federal Regulations (US), as of December 12, 2016, has 54938 separate but not unique, definitions of “person.” The impact of each regulation depending upon its definition of that term.
Other terms have similar semantic difficulties both in the Code of Federal Regulations as well as the US Code.