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The State of the Art in Legislative Editors and the DATA Act

(My plan was for my next blog to contain a mini-tutorial on my editor, that is still coming this weekend)

A report on legislative editors has just been released in Europe. You can find the report at https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/elibrary/document/isa-leos-final-results. It’s a very interesting read. It’s focused on Europe but is something we should look at seriously in the US.

After almost a decade in this business, I discovered my European counterparts a couple years ago when I attended the LEX Summer School in Ravenna, Italy (Info on ths year’s class can be found here) What struck me was how much innovative work was occurring in Europe compared to the USA. Sure we have plenty of XML initiatives in the […]

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Building a Web-Based Legislative Editor

I built the legislative drafting tool used by the Office of the Legislative Counsel in California. It was a long and arduous process and took several years to complete. Issues like redlining, page & line numbers, and the complexities of tables really turned an effort that, while looking quite simple at the surface, into a very difficult task. We used XMetaL as the base tool and customized it from there, developing what has to be the most sophisticated implementation of XMetaL out there. We even had to have a special API added to XMetaL to allow us to drive the change tracking mechanism to support the very specialized redlining needs one finds in legislation.

Using an XML editor allows one to […]

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Toward’s more Affordable Solutions in Legal Informatics – with...

Got six million dollars? That’s the ballpark figure for a complete legislative system and it is too much. A decade ago when the technologies were still new, the risks were high, and experience was scarce, the reasons for this were easily explained. But now it’s time to move beyond the early-adopter market towards a more mature, affordable, and predictable market for legislative systems. The key to moving to this new era is standards.

Towards this end I am participating as a member of the OASIS LegalDocML Technical Committee. Our charter is to develop a common standard for legal documents. We had our initial meeting in March and are defining our deliverables for this important mission.

The wide variety of legal systems and traditions ensures […]

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International Open Standards Hackathon

An international open standard for legislative documents will be an important next step for making legislative information available to the people. An open standard will promote the creation of tools and services worldwide that will enable citizen participation in the legislative process and will enhance how governments make the laws they produce more transparent.

Today there is a great deal of inconsistency in how open participation and transparency are achieved around the world. Putting cultural and political differences aside, part of the reason for the inconsistency is the tremendous effort and cost involved in building the infrastructure to support these new objectives. An open standard will start to solve this problem by promoting the establishment of a real legal informatics industry […]

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International Meeting on Transparency and the use of Open Document Standards

This past week was a very interesting week for me. I attended the meeting “Achieving Greater Transparency in Legislatures through the Use of Open Document Standards” at the U.S. House of Representatives in Washington DC. The meeting was sponsored by the United Nations, the Inter-Parliamentary Union, and the U.S. House of Representatives.

For me it was a valuable opportunity to meet with colleagues I had already met in my travels in recent years, to meet with people I knew of but had never met, and to meet people I had corresponded with only through email. Particularly special for me was to finally meet Tim Arnold-Moore. It was by reading his thesis […]

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And now for something completely different… Chinese!

Last week we saw how Akoma Ntoso can be applied to a very large consolidated Code – the United States Code. This week we take the challenge in a different direction – applying Akoma Ntoso to a bilingual implementation involving a totally different writing system. Our test document this week is the Hong Kong Basic Law. This document serves as the constitutional document of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China. It was adopted on the 4 April 1990 and went into effect on July 1, 1997 when the United Kingdom handed over the region to the People’s Republic of China.

The Hong Kong Basic Law is available in English, Traditional Chinese, and Simplified […]

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Applying Akoma Ntoso to the United States Code

A few weeks ago the U.S. House of Representative’s Committee on House Administration held a one day Legislative Data and Transparency Conference. While I was not able to attend in person, I did listen in to the presentation via the live stream that was provided.

Of all the things I learned that day, one specific detail intrigued me the most – that there is an XML representation of the United States Code that has been made available. This XML is available at http://uscode.house.gov/xml. While the data is a little stale and some titles are mysteriously absent (Title 14, the repealed Title 34, and Title 51), it is a great source to begin experimenting with the United […]

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Computerize vs. Automate

There are two words that have long been important to me: computerize and automate. The dictionary defines these words as follows:

Computerize

(kəm-pyū’tə-rīz’)
tr.v., -ized, -iz·ing, -iz·es.
1. To furnish with a computer or computer system.
2. To enter, process, or store (information) in a
  computer or system of computers

Automate

(ô’tə-māt’)
v., -mat·ed, -mat·ing, -mates.
v.tr.
1. To convert to automatic operation: automate a factory.
2. To control or operate by automation.

We often make the mistake of confusing these two concepts as the same thing. They are very different. Doing one does not imply the other. Using a computer does not mean you have automated and automating […]

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Legislative Information Modeling

Last week I brought up the subject of semantic webs for legal documents. This week I want to expand the subject by discussing the technologies that I have encountered recently that point the way to a semantic web. Of course, there are the usual general purpose semantic web technologies like RDF, OWL, and SPARQL. Try as I might, I have been unable to get much practical interest out of anyone in these technologies. Part of the reason is that the abstraction they demand is just beyond most people’s grasp at this point in time. In academic circles it becomes easy to discuss these topics, but step into the “real world” and interest evaporates immediately.

Rather than pressing ahead with those technologies, […]

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What is a Semantic Web?

Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, defines a semantic web quite simply as “a web of data that can be processed directly and indirectly by machines“. In my experience, that simple definition quickly becomes confusing as people add their own wants and desires to the definition. There are technologies like RDF, OWL, and SPARQL that are considered key components of semantic web technology. It seems though that these technologies add so much confusion through abstraction that non-academic people quickly steer as far away from the notion of a semantic web as they can get.

So let’s stick to the simple definition from Tim Berners-Lee. We will simply distinguish the semantic web from our existing web by saying that a […]