Opening Public Data: a path towards innovative legal services - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Opening Public Data: a path towards innovative legal services

Tommaso Agnoloni Institute of Legal Information Theory and Techniques ITTIG-CNR

agnoloni@ittig.cnr.it

LAW VIA THE INTERNET 2011 Hong Kong, 8-10 June

The “Open” in Open Data

Open Data is about data re-use

“A piece of content or data is open if anyone is free to use, reuse, and redistribute it — subject only, at most, to the requirement to attribute and share-alike.”.

The Open Knowledge Definition (OKD) (opendefinition.org/okd)

Make Data legally open

• Use existing licensing:

Public Domain (no rights reserved)

– Public Domain Dedication & License (PDDL) – Creative Commons Zero (CC0)

Attribution (you must give credit)

– Open Data Commons Attribution (ODC-BY) – Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY)

‘Sharealike’ (you must share back)

– Open Data Commons Attribution-Sharealike (ODbL) – Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike (CC-BY-SA)

• Or create your own license

Make Data technically open

Raw Data - separate informative content from presentation

• Use open formats (txt, XML,

html, odt)

• use URIs for identification
• expose the data for access via

the HTTP protocol

• use the RDF data model to

describe content of resources and to link them to other useful information (Machine Readable METADATA)

RDF Data Model

• Provides the missing relational level
• simple data model based on triples
• Statements are <subject, predicate, object> triples:

– <Book X, hasAuthor, Author Y>

• Can be represented as a graph:
• Statements describe properties of resources
• A resource is any object that can be pointed to by a URI:
• The subject of one statement can be the object of another

A collection of statements creates a directed labeled graph

• Resources available distributed on the web

Author Y Book X

hasAuthor

From a Web of Documents to a Web of Data

2007 2011

Establish machine readable meaningful links among resources on the web of data just like hyperlinks connect html documents on the web of documents

Motivations for open PSI

• Transparency
• Accountability
• Public control of

government

• Engagement /

participation / democracy

• More efficient use of

public resources

• Economic value
• EUROPEAN PSI is

estimated to worth €27 billion

• Added value on data

(metadata)

• Apps/Services fed by

publicly available data - new market

Towards a Legal Data Cloud

EU Legal Sources

Legal Information Access

• Legal sources fragmentation

“To a worryingly large extent, statutory law is not practically accessible today, even to the courts whose constitutional duty it is to interpret and enforce it. There are four principal reasons. … First, the majority of legislation is secondary legislation. …Secondly, the volume of legislation has increased very greatly over the last 40 years …Thirdly, on many subjects the legislation cannot be found in a single place, but in a patchwork of primary and secondary legislation. … Fourthly, there is no comprehensive statute law database with hyperlinks which would enable an intelligent person, by using a search engine, to find out all the legislation on a particular topic.”

Lord Justice Toulson in R v Chambers [2008] EWCA Crim 2467

 LINKED DATA PRINCIPLES

Legal Information Standards

• URN:Lex
• XML Schema (Metalex/CEN, Crown XML,

NormeInRete..)

• Legislative metadata model (FRBR+Metalex

Cen+Dublin Core .. )

• Legal Ontologies – Core Legal Ontologies, LKIF

reusable but..

TOP DOWN APPROACH lots of structure – few instances …

Reuse existing schema

• Instances first
• Refine later
• Technically

feasible thanks to interoperable standards

Linked open data approach:

RAW DATA NOW! BOTTOM UP First source of structured information: existing databases – exposed and published on the web of data according to LOD Principles

Interplay with semantic assets

Technically interoperable thanks to web standards with:

• Thesauri: EUROVOC Skos/XML

– Multilingual retrieval

• Legal ontologies

– conceptual access; e.g. topic filtered view on data

• Computational lexicons

– Improved automated semantic relation

Innovative legal service

• On top of the data layer
• Views / Services
• Integrated access by subject
• Cross dataset query
• Recompose fragmented sources in a single

place providing services accessing distributed resources

• Automated (machine readable resources)

Mash-ups

LEGAL DATA Legislation Case-Law Bills Amendments Proposals Votes “SOCIAL DATA” Blogs Comments News Social networks SCIENTIFIC DATA Literature Bibliography Abstracts Doctrine FACTUAL DATA Trends Statistics Indicators

Conclusions

• Open Data movement is complementary and

compatible in principles with FALM

• Provides viable pragmatic technical solutions

to put in practice freedom of access in terms

• f information REUSE
• Expanded community to push for public data

publication freely licensed

• Legal datasets in Europe increasingly open

published – huge potential for innovative services