[Open-Legislation] Belgian initiative BeLaws

[Tim Esselens]

> How about a standard for creating a general API?

That would be a good thing, but since we developers will be able to
translate quickly between our internal APIs I suggest thinking hard
before releasing a public one. ie: get someone with a law degree to
tell us how they would want to interface would they be programmers. It
makes it easier for future apps to be lawer-mindset-compatible.

> Reusing the okfn annotator seems like an interesting idea for a front-end
> btw: http://okfn.org/projects/annotator/

Yes! this lib would be ideal, we might also want to collect the
annotations and mix them with the json output.

> @Nuno: about this law changes this law-decree, we also have this. We have
> not solved this problem so far.

The problem with diff/ref-ing the law (in belgium at least) is that it
is sometimes written out ie: 'in paragraph two AND in case of ... '

However there are some dbs in belgium we didn't scrape (yet).

Again, this has impact on a public API, we should gather intel on how
lawyers see this, how they read changes, refs, ... as to avoid pushing
our mindset into their world, we should try to adapt to them, and then
adding what we think could be useful for them.

> BeLaws: nice simple interface. Like it. And the lagen.nu idea of feedback
> from the user community also.

Thank you! we will see what we can do.

Thanks again to everyone involved in this!
--
kind regards,
Tim Esselens