[Open-Legislation] Historic Statutes - Isle of Man

[Francis Davey]

2014-02-24 15:59 GMT+00:00 Graeme Jones <jonesiom at gmail.com>:

> Yes, I met up with Antonio Acunas in London to help IOM switch from Crown
> Copyright to UK OGL.
>
>
Excellent.


> Ok, we do still have the bill at each stage and already have PDFs 10+
> years....
>
>
Bills are really interesting for historians and there's some very useful
work (that hasn't been done really) linking them up with debates and
current legislation.


> I exhaustively tested OCR systems and third party hardware and finally
> settled on an Abbyy app server (£100) with a high end Canon scanner (£6k).
>  We will definitely drag and drop all documents into an app server polled
> network folder to conver to OCR PDF before upload but the OCR quality is
> worthless when the documents are handwritten beyond the late 1800s, of
> course.
>
>
I found Abbyy pretty good when I had OCR tasks to perform so that sounds
great.

We'll have to wait for a while before we can OCR handwritten materials
before 1800.

Francis


> Best regards,
> Graeme
>
> On 24 February 2014 14:54, Francis Davey <fjmd1a at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> 2014-02-24 14:35 GMT+00:00 Graeme Jones <jonesiom at gmail.com>:
>>
>> Hi John
>>>
>>> I have collated and reconciled national database with all secondary
>>> legislation (about 40k documents in 2 years to date) but we did not make
>>> any distinction between in force and revoked.  In fact, the 30k spare page
>>> scans have been allocated to repealed primary legislation.
>>>
>>>
>> This all looks great.
>>
>> Are there plans to use an open licence for your material (at the moment
>> marked as "Crown Copyright")? It would be really good if IM legislation was
>> open. You may know all about open licensing and this is on your list, but
>> both the ODI and the OKF run courses on open licensing should you need any
>> support (I teach on the ODI course).
>>
>>
>>> So, we are now in the process of uploading secondary legislation back to
>>> 1477 at the Isle of Man Parliament website - customised Microsoft
>>> Sharepoint.
>>>
>>> I guess it is easier for a parliament to decide to upload everything
>>> ever laid/debated as a democratic record than a government or department to
>>> fund anything not ongoing core business!
>>>
>>>
>> Certainly this is a great start. The UK legislative process is such that
>> the final version of a bill may not technically be a Parliamentary document
>> (i.e. it the result won't be held by Parliament), so the UK Parliament is
>> only able to do so much, but having the versions of bills is useful at each
>> stage.
>>
>> Shame it's all PDF, but that's better than not having it. In the future I
>> hope that we will eventually persuade legislators it is easier to use
>> drafting tools to draft things in properly marked up format.
>>
>> --
>> Francis Davey
>>
>>
>


-- 
Francis Davey
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