[Open-Legislation] Hello

Sat Jan 22 11:00:23 UTC 2011

Hi,

I'm likely to be a bystander, but I might be of some help to someone.
Just to introduce myself, I'm a lawyer practising in England (a
barrister for those who appreciate the difference). I'm madly keen on
open data and used to write scrapers a little for relaxation (sadly I
don't have the time any more). For an example see:

http://scraperwiki.com/scrapers/uk-supreme-court-decisions-31-july-2009-/

on the scraperwiki site (who are clients of mine as well, so this is a
bit of a shameless plug).

Its conceivably possible I might be of some use in commenting on
schema and use cases of legislation. I've had a go at various scrapers
of UK legislation, made attempts to reuse the information so gathered
(most failed miserably) and had long conversations with the government
body involved in publishing the legislation (OPSI in particular).

The UK government do have an XML schema:

http://www.legislation.gov.uk/schema/legislation.xsd

(with lots of includes from there)

I'm not sure if there is currently an XML API. It was experimental.
The newest thing I could discover was:

http://www.opsi.gov.uk/legislation-api/developer/formats/xml

It would be simple enough to ask OPSI what they think.

The html they produce has enough markup that you can work out what the
structure is anyway:

http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1998/29/contents

albeit its relatively hard work.

I spent a period of illness last year writing something that tried to
find definitions and mark up links to them. It sort of half worked,
but I also tried to mark up links to other legislation and that is
much, much harder.

I'd really love to see some standards for:

- citing legislation
- turning that into standard URL's that find the relevant legislation for you
- structuring legislation

So, good luck with your project. If anyone wants to ask about law then
drop me a line. In terms of legislation, knowledge is roughly UK >
European > US > French > Irish > anything else.

-- 
Francis Davey