Legal Information Institute - Linked Legal Data (“Baseball Cards”)

Note

This project now has a full team.

Clients

Sara Frug, Associate Director for Technology Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School
Email: <ssf6@cornell.edu>

Thomas R. Bruce, Director Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School
Email: <tom@liicornell.org>

Background

The Legal Information Institute (LII) at Cornell Law School is an open-access legal publisher which combines advanced technology with editorial expertise to create materials that help people better understand the law. It operates the single most heavily-used website at Cornell, with over 150,000 unique visitors per day and 100 million pageviews per year; it accounts for over 65% of Cornell’s web traffic.

For the past 21 years, the LII has published value-added versions of primary law materials (the U.S. Constitution, Supreme Court cases, the U.S. Code and the Code of Federal Regulations). It has published secondary materials that explain the law (the Wex legal dictionary/encyclopedia, the LII Supreme Court Bulletin previews). It has offered access to materials by topic, by corpus, and via full-text search.

The LII now uses Semantic Web technologies to improve search results; connect regulations to interpretive guidance and scientific research on the subject matter of those regulations; and display visually the overlaps in jurisdiction between regulatory agencies. In the process of developing Semantic-Web-backed features, we have discovered latent demand for novel display and organization, but also real challenges in creating scalable designs (both in terms of presenting increasingly large collections of metadata and in terms of maintaining responsiveness from visualization software).

Project

Develop pluggable, scalable components and page designs for “baseball cards”, which will provide summary and presentation of the connections between things in the real world and the laws that relate to them. A less sophisticated, less capable example of what we have in mind can be found at http://liicr.nl/1eODfDH, which pulls together information drawn from Wikipedia and several other websites into a summary, card-like form at the upper right hand corner of the page. In this case, the material is about cockatiels, which are an LII mascot. But a “baseball card” for pseudoephedrine -- a component of over-the-counter medications which is frequently used in the production of illegal drugs -- might display standardized data and links from the Drugbank pharmaceutical database about the drug, the laws that affect its sale (e.g., the “Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act of 2005”), regulations from different agencies that affect it (e.g., FDA and DEA), and pathways to material about related concepts (e.g., over the counter drugs, drug abuse, criminal penalties, enforcement statistics, and so on).

Challenges include developing designs for:

• third-party metadata integration and display (e.g., metadata selection for different categories of things, such as people, companies, products, plants, animals, drugs, government agencies)
• internal metadata analysis and organization (e.g., definitions, secondary sources, case law, statutes, regulations)
• disambiguation (e.g., battery as in assault-and-battery, battery-of-tests, power source - then as a component of a medical device, a potential explosion hazard, a potential pollution source)

The LII uses the Drupal CMS with custom modules that facilitate retrieval, processing, and presentation of triple store query results. We have also made use of a standalone third-party visualizer called LodLive. Part of the scope and feasibility assessment will involve assessing integration options.

Impact

More than 20 million visitors use the LII site every year. The audience includes government lawyers; non-lawyers who make routine professional use of the the law (human services providers, hospital administrators, bankers, anyone working in a regulated industry); and ordinary people with episodic, often traumatic, encounters with the law (divorce, tax problems, personal bankruptcy, disability). The baseball card feature will make it easier for readers to navigate from the specific material they encounter by entering the site (usually from a Google search) to the general material that will help them understand the context of what they are reading. We are particularly interested in applying the approach to Federal regulations, which affect nearly every aspect of American life, from the water we drink and air we breathe to the products we make and use every day.