[Open-Legislation] Hello

[stef]

hey Francis,

good to have you here.

On Sat, Jan 22, 2011 at 11:00:23AM +0000, Francis Davey wrote:
> 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).

yes scraperwiki is an awesome piece of work.

> 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

as a legal expert do you think that schemas and national legislation processes
can be abtracted so far, that we can have the same system across all MS?

> (most failed miserably) and had long conversations with the government
> body involved in publishing the legislation (OPSI in particular).

i'm involved at the EU level and somewhat on hungarian. eu has some nice html
and it is possible to scrape, but no xml that i know of. but tbh expecting
some db of one of the big enterprise db providers, there ought to be an xml
interface to the db, it just needs to be switched on.

> 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.

kool, we also have some german experience on the list. the more the merrier.
;)

cheers,s

-- 
gpg: https://www.ctrlc.hu/~stef/stef.gpg
gpg fp: F617 AC77 6E86 5830 08B8  BB96 E7A4 C6CF A84A 7140