[Open-Legislation] openlaws.eu EU Project starting today

[Clemens Wass]

Dear all,

thank you for sharing your thoughts!

@Sander: yes, the idea is really to involve the community to a very large
extent right from the beginning. This means that not everything is ready or
perfect. Actually I am happy that we already have a project website...

@Francis: great, thx for this information. We have two partners from the UK
on board, because of the excellent UK databases. Same for Austria. In
Austria we have all legislation in the database. On an Austrian state level
laws are even electronically published in a binding/authentical way (here
the print version is only a copy; not yet for the federal states). Case law
for the high courts is quite ok, but not everything is published. Currently
only state law is available as open data (therefore we will run a standard
search engine to somehow integrate the rest).

We have a new App for Austrian law in the pipeline. The current version we
have is a little slow and not really user-friendly... I'll keep you up to
date on this.

Regarding the project itself: The idea is really to integrate several open
legal databases and provide tools so that people can better organize and
work with that content. This will include linking, highlighting, creating
personal folders, etc. This way we try to get some more metadata which then
can be analyzed. Our internal capacities are rather limited, but I really
hope that by providing open interfaces etc, the community will also use the
platform to link additional databases (which is quite some effort) and to
provide additional modules.

Apart from the ICT platform we will also come up with a policy
recommendation for DG Justice. What could open mean in the legal world?
Towards more transparency, collaboration, participation...

I would be really grateful for any comment, either on a technological or on
a policy level! So please send your ideas and share it with the rest of the
mailing list. The sooner the better. If before April 12, I will be happy to
take it to the kick-off for discussion!

Best,

Clemens





2014-04-02 22:36 GMT+02:00 Francis Davey <fjmd1a at gmail.com>:

> 2014-04-02 21:04 GMT+01:00 Jörn Erbguth <joern at erbguth.net>:
>
> However preliminary solutions tend to persist and I know more than one
>> project that claimed to be open but in fact stuck to at first preliminary
>> proprietary solutions till the end. I think that Eriks mail could serve you
>> as a good reminder not to do that.
>>
>
> We have a publicly available database of court decisions (www.bailii.org)
> run by an industry-funded charity. It is very much not open and its
> existence make it much more difficult to make real progress on making the
> underlying data open.
>
> --
> Francis Davey
>
>
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