Legal document standards, part 2
Rasmus blogs about open standards and open access for law texts, a topic of great interest to me as of lately (or ‘obsession’, apparently :-). We both agree that there are too little of that, and that the much-heralded open governement could do better in this area.
Anyway, I came across an interesting report, a summary from a conference held about two years ago. It featured various people working with legal information systems, both in the government and private companies, sharing their views on standardisation of document formats and systems. There are views from the people behind Rixlex, Infodata and Notisum, amongst others, but also an interesting view into the state of legal information standards in Norway. They seem to be way ahead of Sweden in this area.
The general consensus seemed to be “standardization is good, and we should do it”, but with no real commitments or timeplans. Maybe there has been developments that I don’t know about since then. This was, after all, two years ago.
Meanwhile, if you want to do interesting stuff today with the body of swedish law, such as making a WAP version or performing graph analysis of all references contained in the 7500+ texts, just download my completely non-{standardized,documented} XML version and go nuts!
There are now at least three document standards, or efforts to create such, for marking up law texts and other legal doucments on my radar: uscfrag (mentioned earlier), used by Cornell University for marking up US Code, LegalXML which seems to be US-centric, and LEXML, which appears to be more EU-centric. It even has it’s own Sourceforge page!
I had no idea so much was going on in so many committees when I started working on the XMLization of swedish law. In a way I’m glad that I didn’t, since I probably would have focused too much on adhereing to these emerging standards and less time to, you know, getting things done. Or worse, just waited for them to actually finish.
Tags: lagen.nu, rättsinformation, XML