Category Archives: Standards

Standards

To go Open Source or Not?

It is my dream to establish a legal informatics industry. Today, legal informatics is conducted either as an internal function or by consulting firms that specialize in long multi-year projects to build custom solutions. The few commercial products that exist are in the form of proprietory products or web services. Compared to many other forms of informatics, legal informatics has evolved very slowly. Part of the reason for this, of course, is the specialized nature of this field. This is particularly the case with legislative information where each legislature or parliament has long established traditions that are difficult to change.

As with every other informatics field, an industry will be established eventually. The costs of custom built software are simply economicially impractical in many cases, demanding a re-think about how solutions are created. For me, a key part of establishing that industry is the creation of standards. Whether there are official standards or de facto standards, standards will spur on the creation of an industry by creating a common model upon which to build. I have seen this happen in other industries that I have participated in and I don’t see why legal informatics should be any different. Yes, legal informatics is tardy in this regard, but that slowness should not discourage us from making it happen now.

So the question is quite simple. Can an open source solution form the basis of a de facto standard for legal informatics? And if so, what does that solution need to consist of? That is the question we have been wrestling with. There are two sides to this argument. While we might want to promote the establishment of an industry, at the same time we need to provide an economic incentive that will encourage businesses to participate. Could providing too much of an open source solution merely enable existing players to be more efficient, yet continue to work in relative isolation? It seems that a better outcome would be to promote the creation of interoperable products that can be mixed or matched to solve the multitude of needs in this field.

To this end, we’re trying a two pronged approach. First, we are fully supporting the establishment of official standards through bodies such as OASIS. Secondly, understanding that the official standard route is going to be a slow and perhaps arduous process, we’re pushing for the establishment of de facto standards. To this second goal, we have open-sourced our own SLIM model for legislation. It’s a very simple XML model based on 10 years experience building these types of models. While it isn’t a be-all and end-all solution, it is consistent with the current XML thinking and is quite easy to adopt. I have spent a fair amount of time wrestling with how to release it as an open source package recently. There are two questions I have:

  1. Which model? There are so many to choose from: Creative Commons, GNU, BSD, etc. Which model is permissive enough without discouraging commercial entities from adopting it.
  2. What aspects should be open source? I think it is quite clear that any and all XML information models should be open. That is in the spirit of XML, is consistent with the public domain nature of legislative information, and will allow the data to be accurately interpreted long after any particular software application of company has run its course. But would providing foundational software packages that are also open source further encourage the adoption of the model? And if that is the case, what foundation software would be beneficial?

At this point we have answered the first question and the first part of the second. We have chosen to release the SLIM XML schema as open source by using a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. The rest of the second question remains open. What else we should provide with an open source license? Certainly it cannot be our full software suite. We are a commercial business and we need to make a living. But parts of our packages could be released to promote the adoption of SLIM as a de facto standard of sorts. What do you think?

Standard
Process, Standards

Welcome to my new blog on Legal Informatics

Imagine that all the world’s laws are published electronically in an open and consistent manner. Imagine that you or your business can easily research the laws to which you are subject. Imagine an industry that caters to the needs of the legal profession based on open worldwide standards.

Of course, there are many reasons why this is just not possible. Every legislature or parliament has their own way of doing things. Every country has their own unique legal system.  Every jurisdiction has their own unique traditions. It simply isn’t possible that all these unique requirements could be harmonized to achieve that vision. Of course not… But it will happen. It might take 50 years, but eventually it will happen. We can debate endlessly why it won’t. We can argue over nuances that get in the way forever. That’s not why I am writing this blog.

I want to open the discussion to how it might happen. What steps can we can start taking right now that will lead us towards our eventual goal? We live in an era where there is widespread dissatisfaction with the way our governments pass laws. There are constant calls for better transparency into the workings of the legislative process. The dissatisfaction we all feel has created an opportunity for entrepreneurial startups. Their goals are most often to affect change in government. For those of us with existing experience in this field, how can we harness our knowledge and work with these emerging efforts to achieve a greater good for us all?

I’ve spent the past ten years in this field, working as a consultant and developer primarily to the State of California. See my About for more about me. Now, with that experience to draw upon, I am hoping to make this blog a useful tool to others that might learn from my past. I’m going to make this blog a regular part of my life – posting regularly, maybe weekly. With each post I want to raise a number of questions and open up thoughtful discussions. Some of the topics I have in mind:

  • How do we balance openness and transparency with business opportunity?
  • Do we need open standards? If not now, when?
  • When it comes to openness and transparency, what is the government’s responsibility?
  • Are there technologies we need to focus on?
  • Isn’t this a Semantic Web for law? What does that mean anyway?
  • And from time to time I will share some of the questions I get each week about how to model legislation in XML. I’ll try not to get bogged down in technical minutiae.

What else? Please leave me a comment with your suggestions. Rather than just being a blog, I would like to see this grow into more of a conversation about how legal informatics can be applied to achieve a truly beneficial semantic web for law.

What could your role be in all this? Are you a government agency, a not-for-profit, a fledgling startup, a publishing company, or even a technology supplier or consultant like myself? Regardless of who you are, I am asking for your participation in this blog. Together we can shape the future of how legal information is shared around the world.

So let’s get started… My next post will start with a question I have been wrestling with lately – How can we heed the call for better open source data without hindering the for-profit motive that will foster an industry?

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