This is a LegalHack@OKCon 2013 challenge.

Semantic Legal

Swiss laws and regulations are for a big part digitally available. To access them one can use various web platforms, some of them are free, others are available by subscription only. The goal of this project challenge is to think about new ways of how Swiss laws and regulations could be digitally published.

The development of laws could be better understood graphically, oriented by topic. Even more importantly, changes in laws should be understood with as much clarity as possible.

Hackathon goals

  1. Laws and individual articles of court decisions, could be linked to relevant votes from the parliamentary debates, and possibly with legal commentaries.
    • It should be directly visible, when something is stated in an article, if this law has been been decided upon or defined.
    • The links between different laws and individual articles should be displayed in each case directly.
  2. Linked databases of laws and the application of these laws should be checked for inconsistencies.
    • For this, laws need to be expressed in a format that can be understood by machines, and interpreted in software.
  3. There is already a search for the laws of the Swiss federation and cantons (lexfind.ch).
    • However, on the local level an overview of the laws and a search function is missing.
    • An overview of the laws of a particular commune (Gemeinde) should be made searchable.

The technical implementation could be based on the CEN Metalex project, which was started in the Netherlands. Metalex is based on RDF and Linked Data.

Project

(screenshots or sketches up here)

Brief description goes here. Add sections below if you need more room.

Include links to your demo and/or source code.

  • List and link your actual and ideal data sources.
  • IKS VIE Toolkit - Widget toolkit which helps working with RDFa (microformat) annotated text
  • rdfstore-js - JavaScript RDF stack, including triplestore in full JavaScript
  • Relevant documentation …
  • Blog or forum posts …
  • Tools you used …
  • project/legal/semantic_legal.txt
  • Last modified: 2013/09/19 14:07
  • by stefan_hegyi