Crowdsourced Mapping for Fracking Law

Client

Sara Frug (ssf6@cornell.edu) and Tom Bruce (tom.bruce@cornell.edu), Legal Information Institute

The Legal Information Institute (LII) is a well-known publisher of open-access legal information. It operates the single most active web site at Cornell, with approximately 150,000 unique visitors per day and over 100 million page views during the last calendar year. Since 1992, the LII has been a leader in the application of Internet-based technologies to legal data. We have worked with several successful CS 5150 project teams over the years.

Background

Natural gas mining via hydraulic fracturing, and the law and policy that surround it, involve competing, overlapping geological, geographical, environmental, health, historical, ethnic, sociological, and economic dimensions. Each of these dimensions brings with it a wealth of data that we might want to employ in considering a particular fracking site. This project starts with legal information. The challenge is to harness the insights of legal-design practitioners to produce an location-driven visual representation of the law of fracking -- something like a map-driven Google Now Card service.

The problem

It is possible to get mapping data for geology and existing gas wells. (The FracTracker project maintains data and an app.) There are not currently any integrated services that, based on a person’s geographical location or a GPS-derived shapefile of a piece of land, allow someone to see, in a card-type format, the law of that location. (For example, “what legislation or regulations are currently being considered that affect this location?” “who in Congress represents this area?” “which federal, state, local agencies are in charge of water quality, traffic, spills on the highway?” “are leases being signed exclusively by individual landowners, pooled communally, handled by the Department of Interior?”)

The goals

• Allow a user to capture a pinpoint location or set of GPS-derived coordinates to define a border
• Allow a user to submit information about their location
• Present to the user “what is the law, related to fracking, of where I’m standing right now?”

The resources

Data and platforms are widely available. In order to be feasible, this project will require reuse of existing resources (most likely the Google Maps API, FracTracker data).

The data:

Because of the scope of the available data, the project this semester will maintain a tight focus on the challenge of integrating law and government-related information with geography. Questions that bear on whose data we use and how we use it include:

• Whose laws are we talking about? federal, state, tribal, county, city, village, town
• How are those laws organized and discovered? Subjects include land use, environmental protection, occupational safety, oil and gas law, energy security
• Who are the institutional actors? EPA, OSHA, DHS, DoE

Some tasks might include:

• Integrating existing shapefiles for things like congressional districts, tribal lands
• Extracting addresses and geographical data from bills, Federal Register entries, web sites for things like areas affected, EPA regions, NCore monitoring stations, state Soil and Water Conservation District offices
• Integrating existing metadata associating locations with legal information (e.g., land trusts)