[Open-Legislation] EU Cases project

Wed Dec 25 07:14:14 UTC 2013

First of all sorry for joining this discussion a bit late, I just joined the working group and catch up by reading your previous emails on the list archives.

> What is really wanted is something that links to individual parts of an
> instrument. That should be fairly easy given EU drafting styles (much
> easier than for UK legislation) but is a little more work in filtering and
> would require instruments with suitable anchors in them.

We have been working on exactly this for quite some time now, initially covering most of the international courts and arbitration centers. These institutions offer a good training ground, as each one of them has its very own publishing standards and conventions, with many databases as data source. The point is, as you mention, to link not only the cases id (which is indeed easy, even when there is no unified nomenclature / id system in place), but to link concepts within the documents, cross-references and other entities such as names of corporations, countries and even individuals (at least he neutrals, which are way easier to identify than just any random name appearing in any given document, without further context).

The task is feasible, but it's also quite complex. It will be a pleasure to share resources, code and join in efforts. As said in a previous email we will be publishing a paper at the new Open Access to Law Journal, please check it out and let me know what do you think.

Draft available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10609/26261
                    http://ssrn.com/abstract=2371795

The project has been running for almost a year, although so far it was only an academic endeavor. We want to release it all this year, and open it up as open source, publishing a CKAN directory of data-sets, etc. Another thing we are working on is a report, on the lines of the open data census and open data barometer, to evaluate and show the progress many by different countries, both regarding impementation of standards / publication of open data, and impact. Some metrics are the same than used in the aforementioned initiatives, others are specific to law.

--

Enric G. Torrents
Email: e.g.cn at ieee.org
Tel.: +8613122141470
Skype: torrents.enric
cn.linkedin.com/in/enrictorrents/
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