CityCodesAndOrdinances.xml
Posted in berkman, big data, everythingIsMiscellaneous, law, too big to know on January 16th, 2014 1 Comment »
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:
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Check the work of Legislation.gov.uk on an RDF based legislation database at http://www.legislation.gov.uk/developer/formats/rdf
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Opengovfoundation.org have been doing this for various cities and have open sourced their source code that organizes the laws they are posting online.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Carl Malamud has been making these codes openly available for quite a while. Worth looking into.
Any other suggestions?
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