Every year, Cornell’s Faculty of Computing and Information Science sponsors a “science fair” called Bits on our Minds (BOOM).  The exhibition showcases cutting-edge student research in all manner of digital realms, ranging from robotics to information retrieval to social applications to game design.   This year, a team of Masters of Engineering students supervised by Dr. Nuria Casellas presented their work on Legal Linked Data. Nuria described it this way:

Today we presented a poster of the current work in the Linked Legal Data project at Cornell’s BOOM science fair (http://boom.cornell.edu/). The LLD project of the Legal Information Institute applies the principles of LOD to legal information to enhance access to the Code of Federal Regulations. The main goal is to develop an RDF store of CFR data through the implementation of several information extraction and natural language processing techniques: the development of a CFR SKOS vocabulary, the extraction of definitions and obligations from text and the ability to relate specific CFR sections to particular products.

The development of this RDF repository of regulatory data regarding both the structure and content of regulations will allow us to build LOD-based applications to improve navigation, discovery and aggregation of the material in the CFR, possibly enabling the development of regulatory information management applications for products. Also, a public endpoint will offer the possibility to access tailored regulatory information.

Sarah Bouwman, Dallas Dias, Jie Lin, Sharvari Marathe, Krithi Rai, Ankit Singh, Debraj Sinha, and Sanjna Venkataraman are the students working in this project.

The project won a BOOM Sponsor’s Award from Susquehanna International Group, a financial trading firm.  As you can tell from Nuria’s description, the real payoff will be new features in the LII’s edition of the CFR.