Legix.Info

Akoma Ntoso (LegalDocML) is now available for public review

It’s been many years in the making, but the standardised version of Akoma Ntoso is now finally in public review. You can find the official announcement here. The public review started May 7th and will end on June 5th — which is quite a short time for something so complex.

I would like to encourage everything to take part in this review process, as short as it is. It’s important that we get good coverage from around the world to ensure that any use cases we missed get due consideration. Instructions for how to comment can be found here.

Akoma Ntoso is a complex standard and it has many parts. If you’re new to Akoma Ntoso, it […]

Legix.Info

Achieving Five Star Open Data

A couple weeks ago, I was in Ravenna, Italy at the LEX Summer School and follow-on Developer’s Workshop. There, the topic of a semantic web came up a lot. Despite cooling in the popular press in recent years, I’m still a big believer in the idea. The problem with the semantic web is that few people actually get it. At this point, it’s such an abstract idea that people invariably jump to the closest analog available today and mistake it for that.

Tim Berners-Lee (@timberners_lee), the inventor of the web and a big proponent of linked data, has suggested a five star deployment scheme for achieving open data — and what ultimately will be a semantic web. […]

Legix.Info

2014 LEX Summer School & Developer’s Workshop

This week I attended the 2014 LEX Summer School and the follow-on Developer’s Workshop put on by the University of Bologna in Ravenna, Italy. This is the fifth year that I have participated and the third year that we have had the developer’s extension.

It’s always interesting to me to see how the summer school has evolved from the last year and who attends. As always, the primary participation comes from Europe – as one would expect. But this year’s participants also came from as far away as the U.S., Chile, Taiwan, and Kenya. The United States had a participant from the U.S. House of Representatives this year, aside from me. In past years, we have also had U.S. participation from […]

Legix.Info

Look how far legal informatics has come – in just a few years

Back in 2001 when I started in the legal informatics field, it seemed we were all alone. Certainly, we weren’t – there were many similar efforts underway around the country and around the world. But, we felt alone. All the efforts were working in isolation – making similar decisions and learning similar lessons. This was the state of the field, for the most part, for the next 6 to 8 years. Lots of isolated progress, but few opportunities to share what we had learned and build on what others knew.

In 2010, I visited the LEX Summer School, put on by the University of Bologna in Ravenna, Italy. What became apparent to me was just how […]

Legix.Info

Imagining Government Data in the 21st Century

After the 2014 Legislative Data and Transparency conference, I came away both encouraged and a little worried. I’m encouraged by the vast amount of progress we have seen in the past year, but at the same time a little concerned by how disjointed some of the initiatives seem to be. I would rather see new mandates forcing existing systems to be rethought rather than causing additional systems to be created – which can get very costly over time. But, it’s all still the Wild Wild West of computing.

What I want to do with my blog this week is try and define what I believe transparency is all about:

1. The data must be […]
   
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Legix.Info

What is Transparency?

I’ve been thinking a lot about transparency lately. The disappearance of Malaysian Airline Flight 370 (MH370) provided an interesting case to look at – and some important lessons. Releasing data which requires great expertise to decipher isn’t transparency.

My boss, when I worked on process research at the Boeing Company many years ago, used to drill into me the difference between information and data. To him, data was raw – and meaningless unless you knew how to interpret it. Information, on the other hand, had the meaning applied so you could understand it – information, to him, was meaningful.

Let’s recall some of the details of the MH370 incident. The plane disappeared without a trace – for reasons that remain a mystery. […]

Legix.Info

2014 Legislative Data and Transparency Conference

Last week, I attended the 2014 Legislative Data and Transparency Conference in Washington D.C. This one day conference was put on the by the U.S. House of Representatives and was held at the U.S. Capitol.

The conference was quite gratifying for me. A good part of the presentation related to projects my company, Xcential, and I are working on. This included Ralph Seep’s talk on the new USML format for the U.S. Code and the Phase 2 Codification System, Sandy Strokof’s mention of Legislative Lookup and Linking and the new Amendment Impact Program (which was demonstrated by Harlan Yu (@harlanyu)), Daniel Bennett’s (@cititzencontact) talk on the legal citation […]

Legix.Info

Building a browser-based XML Editor

Don’t forget the 2014 U.S. House Legislative Data and Transparency Conference this week.

I’m now hard at work on our second generation web-based XML editor. In my blog last week, I talked about the need for and complexities of change tracking in a legislative editor. In this blog, I want to describe more of the overall motivation.

A couple years ago, we built an HTML5-based legislative editor for Akoma Ntoso. We learned a lot from the effort and had some success with a couple customers whose needs matched the capabilities of the editor. The editor was built to use and exploit, to the fullest extent, many of the new APIs added to modern browsers to support HTML5. […]