[Open-Legislation] Hello list and questions re. European datasets

Wed Feb 9 15:00:10 UTC 2011

Hi all,

I would like to introduce myself to this list. I'm a researcher at the AKSW [1] working group at Universität Leipzig. AKSW is involved in the LATC support action [2] and one of the tasks in this project is to publish legal datasets by European institutions as Linked Data as well as to interlink them with other datasets. These datasets include:

- N-LEX (A common gateway to national law) [3]
- Euro-LEX (Access to European Union law) [4]
- Taxation & Customs Union [5]
- European Patent Office [6]
- National Legal and Legislative Resources published as CEN Metalex [7]

Do you think it makes sense to further examine these datasets or do you have suggestions for other datasets that might be useful?  

My first impression of the above datasets is, that they mainly consist of HTML- and PDF-documents, sometimes paired with a search form. Do you know of any efforts or tools to extract those information and make them available in other formats, e.g. CSV? 

I had a look at the wiki page at [8] and it seems that there is a crawler for PreLex. Do you think that it could be adapted for other EU datasets?

Kind regards,
Philipp Frischmuth

[1] http://aksw.org/
[2] http://latc-project.eu/
[3] http://eur-lex.europa.eu/n-lex/
[4] http://eur-lex.europa.eu/
[5] http://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/common/databases/
[6] http://www.epo.org/patents/patent-information/free.html
[7] http://www.metalex.eu/
[8] http://wiki.okfn.org/wg/openlegislation

--
Philipp Frischmuth  -  Department of Computer Science; Universität Leipzig
WebID: http://philipp.frischmuth24.de/id/me Tel/Fax: +49 341 97 323-68/-29