[Open-Legislation] Prior art :-)

Mon Jan 10 22:29:54 UTC 2011

On Mon, Jan 10, 2011 at 22:21, Friedrich Lindenberg <friedrich at pudo.org> wrote:

Hi,

> thanks to all of you for subscribing! Although its most fun to just
> start into a new project with a clean slate, in this one we should
> first have a look at the existing work. So here's my current (and most
> definetly incomplete) overview:

Interesting. Thanks for that. Yes, a wiki would be nice.

> Which ones would you add?

Anyone have references/prior art for markup languages to represent
laws and legal texts? I'd rather not reinvent the wheel on that one.
(something simple but powerful enough to represent german federal
laws. Support for changesets would be ideal)

> * OpenCongress - Tracks Congress bills,
> http://www.opencongress.org/about/code, Ruby (on Rails & Drugs)
> * Tratten - Loads EURLex into MediaWiki,
> https://github.com/kattla/tratten-scripts, Perl.
> * GovTrack.us - Tracks people, legislation etc. in Congress,

uses data from http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c111:h3458: which
provides XML for US congress bills

> http://www.govtrack.us/developers/, Perl and ASP
> * LawLeecher - Load EURLex

Interesting. Forked to github to take closer look at it.
https://github.com/levinalex/LawLeecer

--Levin, who just finished scraping bgbl.de and now has ~10G of pdfs
waiting to be analyzed [2,3]

[1] http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/bab-kabgv/BJNR151300997.html
(goal is to enable something like git blame for every german legal
text, like so: http://bit.ly/gXvQP8)

[2] very, very simple scraper at github.com/levinalex/bgdump anyone
interested in the data?
[3] can draw pretty pictures: http://a.yfrog.com/img620/473/h4gms.png