{"id":6877,"date":"2013-03-11T18:29:40","date_gmt":"2013-03-11T18:29:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lawin.org\/?p=6877"},"modified":"2013-03-11T18:29:40","modified_gmt":"2013-03-11T18:29:40","slug":"linked-data-principles-to-legal-information","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lawin.org\/linked-data-principles-to-legal-information\/","title":{"rendered":"Linked Data Principles to Legal Information"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Linked Data and Law (Legal Information)<\/h3>\n<\/div>\n

Note: see the Encyclopedia’ Linked Data project at Lawi Metadata<\/a><\/p>\n

Bob DuCharme discussed<\/a> the value of linked data in United States law. DuCharme notes, “At a recent W3C Government Linked Data Working Group working group meeting, I started thinking more about the role in linked data of laws that are published online. To summarize, you don’t want to publish the laws themselves as triples, because they’re a bad fit for the triples data model, but as online resources relevant to a lot of issues out there, they make an excellent set of resources to point to, although you may not always get the granularity you want.\u201d<\/p>\n

He continues, “I’m discussing U.S. Federal law here, but similar principles should apply both in individual states and in other countries. The main sets of laws here are legislation, code, regulations, and court decisions. (\u2018Code’ refers to laws passed by legislation, arranged by topic; for example, laws passed about taxes are gathered into the Internal Revenue Code.) If you really want to learn about the various forms of legal material and their relationship, I highly recommend the book Finding the Law<\/em>, which I found indispensable when I worked at LexisNexis.\u201d<\/p>\n

DuCharme goes on, “Most law consists of narrative sentences arranged as paragraphs, often with metadata assigned to certain blocks of it. It’s such a good fit for XML that legal publishers were among the first users of XML’s predecessor, SGML\u2026 So, while you wouldn’t get much benefit splitting these sentences and paragraphs into subjects, predicates, and objects and publishing them as triples, plenty of government data references laws and related materials, and it’s more helpful if they can reference them with URLs that lead to the actual laws. To add these URLs with any kind of scalability, you need to find out the common format for citing a document (or, if possible, a point within a document) and an online source of those legal documents whose URLs can be built from that citation format with a regular expression or some other automated tool.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Linked data version of the Law schedule of the Library of Congress Classification<\/h3>\n<\/div>\n

A linked data version of the Law schedule of the Library of Congress Classification system, Class K, would be useful. Class K lays out a very nice hierarchy for classifying legal materials, but the detailed scheme can do double duty functioning as a reference tool as well as a cataloging tool.<\/p>\n

For Law.gov we can see potential use for Class K as a way to browse content, allowing users to explore the hierarchy and see the larger picture of how materials in the system are grouped together. For example, we are researching the possibility of enabling users to dive into the hierarchy at any point and launch a query to potentially retrieve all items related to that level of classification with the click of a single link. By incorporating a linked data version of the Law Classification<\/a> into Law.gov, we might also create queries to generate relationships between concepts automatically on any given page, perhaps demonstrating relationships between concepts across different jurisdictions, geographic areas, and languages, or showing broader and narrower concepts not easily discovered during a search.<\/p>\n

The law classifications, particularly the newer ones, are a particularly interesting place to start, in part because they present some important challenges. For instance, could the schedules that consist of number ranges for particular regions and countries plus tables for detail within that range be expanded so that the specific numbers could be exposed and used without the necessity of adding up numbers? It seems to me that if the classification is intended to be used as an aid to browsing within a corpus of cataloged items, and as a way to support all kinds of innovation (for instance in figuring out how to applyi the classifications retrospectively), they would need to be expanded and not just published separately as digital analogs to their physical printed versions. I could probably come up with dozens of questions like this (I was a law librarian during the introduction of most of the later schedules) and I’m particularly excited by the thought of bringing classification up front in the conversation about topical access<\/p>\n

Source: https:\/\/blogs.loc.gov\/law\/2012\/03\/a-law-classification-scheme-as-linked-data\/<\/p>\n

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Example of Linked Data Service from the Library of Congress<\/h3>\n<\/div>\n

us: Law<\/p>\n

Here are entered general works on law or legal systems as well as collections of statutes not limited to a specific topic. Works on the science of law are entered [Jurisprudence.] Works on legislative enactments as a source of law, as distinct from constitutional law or from the law arising from judicial or administrative decisions are entered under [Statutes.] Works on the legislative process are entered under [Legislation.] Works on the interpretation of statutes and other laws are entered under [Law–Interpretation and construction.]<\/p>\n

URI(s)
\nhttps:\/\/id.loc.gov\/authorities\/subjects\/sh85075119
\ninfo:lc\/authorities\/sh85075119
\nhttps:\/\/id.loc.gov\/authorities\/sh85075119#concept
\nInstance Of
\nMADS\/RDF Topic
\nMADS\/RDF Authority
\nSKOS Concept Offsite link
\nScheme Membership(s)
\nLibrary of Congress Subject Headings
\nCollection Membership(s)
\nLCSH Collection – Authorized Headings
\nLCSH Collection – General Collection
\nLCSH Collection – May Subdivide Geographically
\nVariants
\nus: Acts, Legislative
\nus: Enactments, Legislative
\nus: Laws (Statutes)
\nus: Legislative acts
\nus: Legislative enactments
\nNarrower Terms
\nus: Bahai law
\nus: Bible and law
\nus: Buddhism and law
\nus: Canon law
\nus: Christianity and law
\nus: Commercial law<\/a>
\nus: Compensation (Law)
\nus: Conflict of laws
\nus: Confucianism and law
\nus: Constitutions<\/a>
\nus: Courts
\nus: Culture and law
\nus: Dead bodies (Law)
\nus: Environmental law
\nus: Formalities (Law)
\nus: Illegality
\nus: International law
\nus: Jurisdiction
\nus: Justice
\nus: Justice, Administration of
\nus: Law, Primitive
\nus: Legal polycentricity
\nus: Natural law
\nus: Practice of law
\nus: Procedure (Law)
\nus: Proportionality in law
\nus: Public law
\nus: Public relations and law
\nus: Publicity (Law)
\nus: Religion and law
\nus: Science and law
\nus: Semantics (Law)
\nus: Semiotics (Law)
\nus: Signature (Law)
\nus: Statutes
\nus: Technology and law
\nus: Violence (Law)
\nRelated Terms
\nus: Jurisprudence
\nus: Legislation
\nExact Matching Concepts from Other Schemes
\nhttps:\/\/lod.nal.usda.gov\/nalt\/68832 Offsite link
\nhttps:\/\/stitch.cs.vu.nl\/vocabularies\/rameau\/ark:\/12148\/cb11978770b Offsite link
\nhttps:\/\/stitch.cs.vu.nl\/vocabularies\/rameau\/ark:\/12148\/cb13318687s Offsite link
\nGeneral Notes
\nHere are entered general works on law or legal systems as well as collections of statutes not limited to a specific topic. Works on the science of law are entered [Jurisprudence.] Works on legislative enactments as a source of law, as distinct from constitutional law or from the law arising from judicial or administrative decisions are entered under [Statutes.] Works on the legislative process are entered under [Legislation.] Works on the interpretation of statutes and other laws are entered under [Law–Interpretation and construction.]
\nExample Notes
\nNotes under [Jurisprudence; Law–Interpretation and construction; Legislation; Statutes]
\nChange Notes
\n2001-08-23: new
\n2011-04-29: revised
\nAlternate Formats
\nRDF\/XML (MADS and SKOS)
\nN-Triples (MADS and SKOS)
\nJSON (MADS\/RDF and SKOS\/RDF)
\nMADS – RDF\/XML
\nMADS – N-Triples
\nMADS\/RDF – JSON
\nSKOS – RDF\/XML
\nSKOS – N-Triples
\nSKOS – JSON
\nMADS\/XML
\nMARC\/XML<\/p>\n

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Linked Data and Law in the United Kingdom<\/h3>\n<\/div>\n

Note: from https:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/voxpop\/tag\/linked-data-and-law\/<\/p>\n

We were also keen that the UK’s Statute Book<\/a> make a contribution to the growing Web of Linked Data<\/a>. The UK government is working hard to publish government data using Linked Data standards as part of work on data.gov.uk<\/a>. The idea of the Web of Linked Data is to connect related information across the Web based on its meaning. In practice this means creating names for things (by ‘thing’ I mean anything: people, places, ideas) using HTTP<\/a>, and when someone requests some information about that thing, returning data about it, ideally using https:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/voxpop\/tag\/linked-data-and-law\/.<\/p>\n

Legislation can make an important contribution to the Web of Linked Data. First, many important concepts and ideas are formally defined by statute. For example, there are 27 types of school in the UK and each one has a statutory definition. (See, e.g., here<\/a> and here<\/a>.) What it means to be a private limited company is again defined by statute<\/a>, as are the UK’s eight data protection principles<\/a>. One of our objectives with legislation.gov.uk is to enable people creating vocabularies<\/a> and ontologies<\/a> to exploit these definitions. This can be done, for example, by using the skos:definition<\/a> property, to link terms in a vocabulary to the statute. The idea is to ease the process of rooting the Semantic Web<\/a> in legally defined concepts. Part of the value of this linking is that it enables automatic checking to determine whether a part of the Statute Book<\/a> has been repealed, in which case the related concept no longer exists. Crucially, legislation.gov.uk gives accurate information about when a section is repealed, by what piece of legislation, and when that repeal comes into force.<\/p>\n

At the moment, the RDF from legislation.gov.uk is limited to largely bibliographic information. We have made use of the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR)<\/a> and the MetaLex vocabularies<\/a>, primarily to relate the different types of resource we are making available. FRBR has the notion of a work<\/i><\/a>, expressions<\/i><\/a> of that work, manifestations<\/i><\/a> of those expressions, and items<\/i><\/a>. Similarly, MetaLex<\/a> has the concepts of a BibliographicWork<\/i> and BibliographicExpression<\/i>. In the context of legislation.gov.uk, the identifier URIs relate to the work<\/i>. Different versions of the legislation (current, original, different points in time, or prospective) relate to different expressions<\/i>. The different formats (HTML, HTML Snippets, XML, and PDF) relate to the different manifestations<\/i>. We have also made extensive use of Dublin Core Terms<\/a>, for example to reflect that different versions apply to geographic extents. This is important as, for example, the same section of a statute may have been amended in one way as it applies in Scotland and in another way for England and Wales. We think FRBR, MetaLex, and Dublin Core Terms have all worked well, individually and in combination, for relating the different types of resource that we are making available.<\/p>\n

One challenge we have is with changes to legislation that have yet to be applied to the data by the editorial team. Since we know what these effects are, we have also tried to represent this in RDF. We have used the MetaLex vocabulary to do this, but the result is complicated to interpret, and thus we suspect difficult for users of the data. MetaLex does not aid the elegant expression of amendment information (such as: statute A is changed by statute B, but only when commencement order C brings that change into force). We will be developing our own light-weight ontology for expressing some of these relationships, with the primary focus on ease of querying our data, rather than creating an ontology with the expressive power to be a cross-jurisdictional model.<\/p>\n

It should then be possible to align this ontology with others post hoc. Our current use of RDF – and the potential to do more – is another issue where we would welcome feedback from the community.<\/p>\n

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Semantic Enhancement<\/h3>\n<\/div>\n

This is from the post of Nuria Casellas: https:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/voxpop\/2011\/01\/18\/semantic-enhancement-of-legal-information%E2%80%A6-are-we-up-for-the-challenge-revised-repost\/<\/p>\n

also include<\/a> the Web of Data<\/a> (or Linked Data<\/a>), which relies on the existence of standard formats (URIs, HTTP and RDF) to allow the access and query of interrelated datasets, which may be granted through a SPARQL endpoint (e.g., Govtrack.us<\/a>, US census data<\/a>, etc.). Sharing and connecting data on the Web in compliance with the Linked Data principles enables the exploitation of content from different Web data sources with the development of search, browse, and other mashup applications. (See the Linking Open Data cloud diagram by Cyganiak and Jentzsch below.) [Editor’s Note<\/i>: Legislation.gov.uk<\/a> also applies Linked Data principles to legal information, as John Sheridan explains in his recent post<\/a>.]<\/p>\n

Moreover, a specification to support the conversion<\/a> of existing thesauri, taxonomies or subject headings into RDF triples has recently been published: the SKOS, Simple Knowledge Organization System<\/a> standard. These specifications may be exploited in Linked Data efforts, such as the New York Times vocabularies<\/a>. Also, EuroVoc<\/a>, the multilingual Thesaurus<\/a> for activities of the EU is, for example, now available in this format.<\/p>\n

“the legal domain offers a perfect area for conceptual modeling and knowledge representation to be used in different types of intelligent applications and legal reasoning systems, not only due to its complexity as a knowledge intensive domain, but also because of the large amount of data that it generates.”<\/p>\n

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Conclusion<\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Notes<\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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See Also<\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

List of top 10 legal articles in Shapiro’s citation data<\/a> (11)
\n Legal Information Institute resources<\/a> (9.4)
\nLegal Information Institute (LII) (9.3)
\n Legal Thesaurus<\/a> (9.1)
\n International legal sources of information<\/a> (8.9)
\n Archives and data<\/a> (8.3)
\n Free legal information<\/a> (8.2)
\n Principles for Allocating Loss<\/a> (7.7)
\n Topic Maps in the Encyclopedia of Law<\/a> (7.4)
\n Lawyers and Principles of Economics<\/a> (6.7)<\/p>\n

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References and Further Reading<\/h3>\n<\/div>\n