A friend is looking into the best way for a city to publish its codes and ordinances to make them searchable and reusable. What are the best schemas or ontologies to use?

I work in a law school library so you might think I’d know. Nope. So I asked a well-informed mailing list. Here’s what they have suggested, more or less in their own words:

• Check the work of Legislation.gov.uk on an RDF based legislation database at http://www.legislation.gov.uk/developer/formats/rdf

• Opengovfoundation.org have been doing this for various cities and have open sourced their source code that organizes the laws they are posting online.

• Open States Project sez, “we have specs for almost everything *except* that at http://opencivicdata.org/. Take a look at http://docs.opencivicdata.org/en/latest/index.html#other-documentation.

• You might have a look at the legal xml folk – see links such as http://blog.law.cornell.edu/voxpop/category/legal-xml/ and http://legislative-data-mapping.challengepost.com/ applying this in a legislative context.

• Waldo Jaquith of the US Open Data Institute and the State Decoded is a brilliant resource on this sort of thing, and has dealt practically with standardizing and making state codes parseable.

• Carl Malamud has been making these codes openly available for quite a while. Worth looking into.

Any other suggestions?

Categories: big data, everythingIsMiscellaneous, law, too big to know dw