{"id":1806,"date":"2011-09-30T08:28:43","date_gmt":"2011-09-30T13:28:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/voxpop\/?p=1806"},"modified":"2011-09-30T08:28:43","modified_gmt":"2011-09-30T13:28:43","slug":"is-it-time-for-law-libraries-to-collaborate-on-description-for-their-own-institutions%e2%80%99-legal-scholarship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/voxpop\/2011\/09\/30\/is-it-time-for-law-libraries-to-collaborate-on-description-for-their-own-institutions%e2%80%99-legal-scholarship\/","title":{"rendered":"Is it Time for Law Libraries to Collaborate on Description for Their Own Institutions\u2019 Legal Scholarship?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Over the past couple of years, there has been a great deal of discussion — particularly in relation to the Durham Statement<\/a> [1] — about technical standards and preservation issues for law reviews that publish openly and exclusively online. \u00a0 Other colleagues have already blogged or written more formally about the lack of metadata being produced in the production of law reviews, and about problems in indexing open access law journal literature. [2]\u00a0 In a previous VoxPopuLII<\/em> post<\/a>, Dr. N\u00faria Casellas discussed the significance of semantic enhancement and how it affects how we should be thinking about providing access to legal information. [3]\u00a0 So I would like to marry the two discussions, by formally asking my academic law librarian colleagues\u00a0whether the time has come for us to work together to develop an ontology [4], a substantive knowledge system that could be used by our law schools’ legal journals in “marking up” content for consumption on the Internet.<\/p>\n

This ontology should be applied not only to what we think of as traditional law journal content, but also to \u201crelated\u201d content — such as companion blogs, video, data, etc. This related content will inevitably grow, as what we think of as a \u201cjournal\u201d evolves. Indeed, a typical “journal” will most likely look very different years from now than it does today.\u00a0 As members of the institutions that publish one of the major forms of literature in law, and as members of organizations that possess significant legal metadata and subject expertise, law librarians are uniquely positioned to facilitate the discoverability and utility of law reviews published on the Web.\u00a0 Such a project also has the potential to support additional projects such as new metrics and ways in which to look at scholarship.<\/p>\n

If this system were indeed widely adopted, it could facilitate a type of access to law journal content that has not been accomplished with existing, centralized means of access, such as Google Scholar<\/a>, the ABA\u2019s project<\/a>, and commercial databases.\u00a0 Ideally, I would like to see our community develop a cooperative that could provide a hosted technical infrastructure to be used by institutions that lack the financial or technical resources to invest in a major repository service or open source solutions.\u00a0 While this idea seems \u201cutopian\u201d at this point, I think that our community could realistically pursue standards and language for the more \u201csubstantive\u201d aspects of the metadata,\u00a0 even if we are unable to agree on the ultimate solutions for preservation or platforms that \u201cserve up\u201d\u00a0 the content.\u00a0 Such an ontology could also serve as a precursor to even more ambitious, collaborative projects to make legal information more accessible and discoverable.<\/p>\n

What do you mean by an ontology?\u00a0 Don\u2019t you just mean a taxonomy or \u201cshared vocabulary\u201d?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I frame the idea as an \u201contology project\u201d because publishing on the Web has increasingly become about structured, open, Linked Data<\/a> and marking up content for the Semantic Web [4].\u00a0 As the significance of Linked Data grows, it is important for us to think about access to legal scholarship in terms of knowledge systems that contemplate access to information in those terms. The use of structured data\/schemas in publishing law reviews would be optimized by human knowledge\/expertise for the expression of ideas and language to be applied in that data.\u00a0 We need to think about subject access beyond the standard, familiar hierarchical \u201csubjects\u201d that we have come to use in our existing taxonomies, indexing, and classification systems.\u00a0 [5]\u00a0\u00a0 We should be thinking about these \u201csubjects\u201d in a way that shows deeper interrelationships between concepts and \u201ctypes\u201d and that \u201cinteracts\u201d\u00a0 and is \u201cinteroperable\u201d with other systems. The ontology approach contemplates access to information from a variety of perspectives in relational and situational ways.<\/p>\n

Law reviews could be published in a way that incorporates a particular ontology that could also be mapped to other ontologies. Linking ontologies in this way would yield useful connections across systems, bodies of knowledge, and perspectives, including multilingual thesauri, interdisciplinary knowledge, and practice-oriented and \u201cpro se\u201d consumer perspectives.\u00a0 Thinking about the project as an \u201contology\u201d also brings to mind three other important features of the system: (1) the \u201cphilosophical\u201d definition of the term “ontology”; (2) the significance of \u201clanguage\u201d and subject expertise; and (3) the flexibility that would allow us to build something dynamic and responsive to the ever-changing nature of law.\u00a0 Such an approach contemplates the approach to legal information advocated in Dr. Casellas\u2019s piece<\/a>. [6]<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t legal indexes already do this?\u00a0 Why reinvent the wheel?\"\"<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

When some of these issues were raised last October at the workshop\u00a0entitled \u201cImplementing the Durham Statement: Best Practices for Open Access Law Journals\u201d<\/a>, someone asked why we should \u201creinvent the wheel\u201d when other longstanding systems (e.g.<\/em>, law journal indexes) are already doing this.\u00a0 Most of these longstanding systems are based on paid subscription models and are not open in a way that facilitates\u00a0rapid response to evolving developments in the law, or use by those who consume legal information.\u00a0 More importantly, this project would really be about facilitating publishing and improving access to online content by providing a quality, substantive, open knowledge structure for journals to use for marking up content and building access into publication. This project would not be an attempt to displace or \u201cusurp\u201d indexes which focus on access to content from the \u201coutside\u201d perspective of the publication itself (and which are increasingly concerned with marketable enhancements like full-text access, search features, user interface, Web 2.0 functionality, etc.).<\/p>\n

The \u201cwheels\u201d we might be accused of reinventing also include \u201cfederated searching\u201d and Web-scale discovery systems being purchased by libraries, but I think similar arguments about cost, perspective on the content, and scope would still apply.\u00a0 Development of our project and adoption of Web-scale discovery systems are not mutually exclusive.\u00a0 Web-scale discovery systems could potentially integrate and map to our system. In any event, the point is not to \u201cthrow out\u201c existing systems, but to create an additional knowledge structure that is open and potentially informed by and interoperable with other existing systems.<\/p>\n

How would we proceed?<\/strong><\/p>\n

There are many approaches to ontology development [7], including derivation from or text-mining of legal texts [8], top-down development by humans, and building upon or extracting from existing ontologies.\u00a0 [9]\u00a0 Any of these methods (or a combination thereof) could work in the case of developing an ontological structure that could be applied to law review content.<\/p>\n

A \u201ctop\u2013down\u201d approach based on the knowledge of individuals could start with librarians. But it should also involve working with law school faculty and scholars having expertise in particular subject areas, as well as with authors of law journal articles, and editors of law journals themselves (particularly those focusing on specialized legal topics).\u00a0 [10]\u00a0\u00a0 Each law school has faculty and librarians who possess specialized legal subject knowledge — as well as collections in particular areas of law — that could enrich the project.\u00a0 In addition to contributing their substantive knowledge, librarians would have an opportunity to develop a language and a system that reflect how they think about and look for information.<\/p>\n

Other colleagues have already suggested greater engagement with law school faculty, for purposes of learning about how faculty conduct and think about research.\u00a0[11]\u00a0 A project like this would give us the opportunity to engage our\u00a0 stakeholders respecting how they think about, contextualize, and relate topics.\u00a0 (Perhaps we could learn more about the way law library stakeholders think about information by presenting them with samplings of articles, and inquiring as to how the stakeholders would \u201cexpect\u201d to find those articles.)\u00a0 Instead of forcing those knowledgeable about their field to learn the taxonomy and structure we have been given by traditional systems, we would be harvesting the expertise of those subject specialists in order to create richer metadata that contemplates their habits and knowledge. Faculty, authors, and journal editors with subject expertise coupled with law librarians could potentially provide a very sophisticated, dynamic, and responsive system.<\/p>\n

We should also consider looking at existing ontologies and other systems, including Library of Congress<\/a> and other popular and relevant systems used in law.\u00a0 There are several ontologies related to law that could inform the project and that could also potentially be mapped. [12]\u00a0 Systems to be consulted (and mapped) could include ontologies designed for primary law and local knowledge management in legal settings, as well as ontologies in subject areas outside the law.\u00a0 Also, some law schools might have their own local systems that could inform ours.<\/p>\n

Finally, while we would probably want to avoid using text mining as the only method, the project should also contemplate doing some mining and extraction from law journal literature itself.\u00a0 Such an approach might be particularly helpful in grappling with older legal concepts and appreciating the use of certain terms\/language over time.<\/p>\n

Whatever method(s) we select, we have a host of inspiration from other projects in legal informatics and from projects in other disciplines (particularly in the sciences) that strive to provide naming conventions within disciplines, and map knowledge across systems through coordinated efforts. Although it is a much more ambitious project than ours, John Willbanks\u2019 Neurocommons project<\/a> provides us with a model of how such a project could garner participation and grow, particularly if we were to coordinate with other projects and ontologies being developed. [13]<\/p>\n

If we build it, who will use it?<\/strong><\/p>\n

If we do develop such a system, who would actually apply it in publishing law reviews?\u00a0 Hopefully, libraries will take the lead and realize that this is a role that they themselves should be fulfilling.\u00a0 While many libraries facilitate repositories and other platforms for publishing law journals and provide training and reference\/research support for cite checking and preemption, many do not provide markup and metadata work on the articles themselves.\u00a0\u00a0 In a recent survey by Benjamin Keele and me in relation to a paper we have been writing, only 1 in 57 respondents reported doing any work on article metadata for their journals. [14]\u00a0 Librarians are already cataloging books and spending time grappling with metadata development and changes in the ways in which we describe our cataloged resources (RDA<\/a>, FRBR<\/a>, etc.). Further, librarians today spend a lot of time and money purchasing or building \u201crepositories\u201d or other platforms for their law journals.\u00a0 Greater support of metadata development for our own institutional output (beyond provision of simplistic taxonomies) is a natural outgrowth of such activities.\u00a0 As other librarians have commented<\/a>, providing institutional repositories is not sufficient. [15]<\/p>\n

Such activity could contemplate new roles for catalogers.\u00a0 A recent NISO Webinar on the impact of Linked Data on library cataloging<\/a> suggested that library catalogers will be less focused on creating \u201crecords\u201d and more concerned with “graphs”<\/a>. The presenters commented that catalogers will enhance the increasing amount of minimal metadata coming directly from publishers, and provide access to original and local content.\u00a0\u00a0 [16]\u00a0\u00a0 Some libraries have already integrated metadata work into their workflows for cataloged resources, and it is possible for a law library to integrate journal work into its technical services workflow. [17]\u00a0 From a reference perspective, librarians are already often exposed to journal content in the early stages of publication through support of preemption checking, student note\/comment research help, and cite checking support. Librarians are thereby in a good position to understand the \u201caboutness\u201d of the content.\u00a0 Such involvement could provide law librarians with a natural progression toward being more involved in helping journals \u201cmark up\u201d their content.\u00a0 It is an opportunity for us embrace more wholeheartedly the role of law libraries as publishers and knowledge managers.\u00a0 Many of our colleagues in the open law movement<\/a>, in knowledge management in legal practice, and in other disciplines have made forays into this area. [18]<\/p>\n

Some would probably argue that libraries do not have sufficient staff to get involved in law journal publishing activities, particularly in markup. In addition, some institutions have entire offices outside the library that support publication activities.\u00a0 Even if libraries feel that they are not in a position to manage the workflow of the application of this knowledge system, the most important contribution librarians can make lies in expertise or intellectual input.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Application of this ontology could also be performed by law students themselves or other law school staff.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Further, authors themselves are potential users and providers of metadata.\u00a0 In many other disciplines, especially the sciences, more authors are using author add-in tools and other software programs to help mark up their manuscripts for publication.\u00a0 Specialized tools could be developed to facilitate authors’ adding metadata to their own law review articles.\u00a0 (Many law authors are already used to contributing keywords to SSRN<\/a> papers.)<\/p>\n

\u201cBut\u2026\u201d: Obstacles and opportunities<\/strong><\/p>\n

As I write this piece, I anticipate comments such as, \u201cThat would be too big of an undertaking,\u201d and:\u00a0 \u201cIs that really our role?\u201d\u00a0 While libraries are feeling the pressure of more limited resources and time, I would argue that this project would synergize with libraries’ existing interactions with our primary users (faculty and students) and could be built into other outreach activities.\u00a0 In the end, it could actually help to create an organic system responsive to users’ needs.\u00a0 Pursuing this project in tandem with other coordinated activities to facilitate open access law journals, law librarians would join many of our university library colleagues in thinking of ourselves in the role of producer\/publisher and in providing new opportunities for our library staff (both technical services and reference\/subject specialists).<\/p>\n

I envision a host of other issues and problems (too many to enumerate in this posting) that might arise in relation to a project such as this, but I consider none of them \u201cinsurmountable.\u201d\u00a0 Below is a sample of some issues that come to mind:<\/p>\n

Coordination\/governance<\/em>: Who would control the project?\u00a0 Who would be the final arbiter of what is adopted?\u00a0 Past discussions of the Durham Statement have suggested the possibility of an organization providing support for journals that tried to \u201ccomply\u201d with the Durham Statement. [19] Such an organization might consider taking on a project such as this.\u00a0\u00a0Perhaps leadership for this project could evolve in some way out of institutional and personal relationships, such as those that have evolved for collection development, [20] or possibly through some coordinated efforts of American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) Special Interest Sections<\/a> (particularly ALL-SIS<\/a>, TS-SIS<\/a>, and RIPS-SIS<\/a>). \u00a0If our own institutions are not willing to support such a project, individual librarians on their own (myself included!) might be willing to contribute time and energy to the project.\u00a0 We are also fortunate to have a supportive community of technologists in the open law and knowledge management fields, who could serve as potential partners.\u00a0 The important aspects of the project are that it should be owned by an entity with diverse representation and interests, and that it should be established as something that will be free.<\/p>\n

Target content and scope<\/em>:\u00a0\u00a0 Would we be framing subjects as they tend to exist in U.S. law review literature?\u00a0 While the structure would be designed for use by law reviews, if it were kept open and without restrictions, it could potentially be adopted by peer-reviewed journals and mapped to other indexing systems, either through Web-scale discovery or other systems.\u00a0 How do we frame an ontology that contemplates incorporation of multiple legal systems and relation to multiple languages? How do we deal with the translation issues that may arise?\u00a0 How would the ontology map to other systems and multilingual thesauri?\u00a0 Should we be contemplating ontologies in other disciplines that have addressed these issues?<\/p>\n

Could it be for naught?<\/em> One might ask, \u201cIf we build it, will they come?\u201d\u00a0 Even if provided with such a system (as well as other best practices and support), would law reviews actually adopt it? Even if they do not apply such a system to their data structures, the substantive system that evolves could also be applied from the \u201coutside\u201d by third parties if the content itself is open.\u00a0 While one could argue that this would truly be \u201creinventing the wheel\u201d in duplicating the efforts of existing indexing systems, one could argue alternatively that the scope, nature, and openness of the resulting system would offer a unique contribution to the indexing environment and would at least provide an additional alternative to the existing systems.<\/p>\n

Technical questions:<\/em> Which particular tools should we use to work collaboratively?\u00a0 What machine-readable formats would we contemplate using?\u00a0 How would we deal technically with systemic changes to the ontology and its application?\u00a0 There is a long list of tools and formats suitable for this project, and of methods for dealing with changes to metadata resources such as ontologies.<\/p>\n

How would we contemplate application of this ontology in existing publishing platforms?<\/em> What tools would we contemplate journals using to mark up documents with metadata from the ontology?\u00a0 Many of the repositories and platforms libraries are currently using permit enhancement of metadata with keywords, user-generated tags, or existing basic subject categories. But existing repositories and platforms do not necessarily facilitate markup that is optimized for the Semantic Web.<\/p>\n

Who is the audience? Who is looking for such an ontology?<\/em> If the language and concepts are at least in part based on the needs and knowledge of our faculty and students, do we develop something tailored to their use instead of developing something that serves broader norms?\u00a0 How could we take into consideration how others (pro se\u2019s, court personnel, etc.) might be looking for information, and map or relate our ontology to other systems that incorporate those users’ perspectives?\u00a0 How could we develop an ontology that contemplates relating to primary law?<\/p>\n

Rights issues:<\/em> Are there rights issues involved in adaptations or derivations of others\u2019 ontologies?\u00a0 How would we want to handle rights issues\/licenses respecting the ontology that we develop? [21]\u00a0 Hopefully, the answer is freely and openly!<\/p>\n

So what do you think?\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Hopefully, this post will spur a discussion that could be continued on this blog or in another forum.\u00a0 In any event, law libraries should be rethinking their roles in the production of law review metadata. Law libraries should be considering how the evolution of the Semantic Web and cataloging standards might impact how they provide support for their own institution\u2019s journals.<\/p>\n

NOTES<\/p>\n

This post is based in part on two draft papers: Benjamin Keele and Michelle Pearse, How Law Libraries Can Help Law Journals Publish Better (poster session presented during the 2011 AALL Annual Meeting in Philadelphia, PA on July 23-26, 2011<\/a>),\u00a0 and Michelle Pearse, Whither the Future of Law Journal Indexing?.<\/p>\n

[1]\u00a0 Richard A. Danner, Kelly Leong, and Wayne Miller, The Durham Statement Two Years Later: Open Access in the Law School Journal Environment, 103 Law Library Journal 39, 52 (2011), http:\/\/scholarship.law.duke.edu\/faculty_scholarship\/2358\/<\/a>; Implementing the Durham Statement: Best Practices for Open Access Law Journals Conference, http:\/\/www.law.duke.edu\/libtech\/openaccess\/conference2010<\/a> (October 22, 2010).<\/p>\n

[2] Tom Boone, Librarians Key to Open Access Electronic Law Reviews,\u00a0 http:\/\/tomboone.com\/library-laws\/2009\/09\/librarians-key-open-access-electronic-law-reviews<\/a> (September 3, 2009) ; Sarah Glassmeyer, Getting to Durham Compliance, SarahGlassmeyer(Dot)Com, http:\/\/sarahglassmeyer.com\/?p=442<\/a> (April 26, 2010);\u00a0 Edward T. Hart, Indexing Open Access Law Journals\u2026or Maybe Not, 38 International Journal of Legal Information 19 (2010), http:\/\/scholarship.law.cornell.edu\/ijli\/vol38\/iss1\/5\/<\/a>.<\/p>\n

[3] Dr. Nuria Casellas, Semantic Enhancement of Legal Information: Are We Up for the Challenge?, VoxPopuLII, http:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/voxpop\/2010\/02\/15\/semantic-enhancement-of-legal-information%e2%80%a6-are-we-up-for-the-challenge\/<\/a> (February 15, 2010).<\/p>\n

[4] Some resources related to this topic appear at http:\/\/schema.org<\/a> and http:\/\/linkeddata.org<\/a>.\u00a0 Some argue that the Semantic Web might already be ill-fated:\u00a0 Janna Quitney Anderson and Lee Rainie, The Fate of the Semantic Web, http:\/\/www.pewinternet.org\/~\/media\/\/Files\/Reports\/2010\/PIP-Future-of-the-Internet-Semantic-web.pdf<\/a> (Pew Research Center 2010). Tom Gruber defines an ontology as “a specification of a conceptualization”: http:\/\/www-ksl.stanford.edu\/kst\/what-is-an-ontology.html<\/a>; Tom Gruber, in the Encyclopedia of Database Systems, Ling Kiu and M. Tamer Ozsu (Eds.), Spring-Verlag, 2009 http:\/\/tomgruber.org\/writing\/ontology-definition-2007.htm<\/a> and\u00a0 http:\/\/semanticweb.org\/wiki\/Ontology<\/a>. Joost Breuker and colleagues elaborate: \u201cThe term \u2018ontology\u2019 may have different meanings: (i) philosophical discipline; (ii) informal conceptual system; (iii) a formal semantic account; (iv) a specification of a conceptualization; (v) a representation of a conceptual system via logical theory, (vi) the vocabulary used by a logical theory, (vii) a meta-level specification of a logical theory.\u201d J. Breuker et al., “The Flood, the Channels and the Dykes,” in Joost Breuker, Pompeu Casanovas, Michael C.A. Klein and Enrico Francesconi, eds., Law, Ontologies and the Semantic Web: Channeling the Legal Information Flood (IOS Press 2009), at 11. Adam Wyner defines “ontology” in the following way: \u201cAn ontology represents a common vocabulary and organization of information that explicitly, formally, and generally specifies a conceptualization of a given domain.\u00a0 Ontologies are related to knowledge management (cf. Rusanow\u2019s ‘Knowledge Management and the Smarter Lawyer’) and taxonomies (cf. Sherwin\u2019s article ‘Legal Taxonomies’).\u00a0 But an ontology is a more specific, explicit and formal representation of knowledge than provided by KM [knowledge management]; and it is richer and more flexible than a taxonomy\u2026.In making an ontology, one turns tacit expert knowledge into explicit representations that can be shared, tested and modified by people as well as processed by a computer.\u201d Dr. Adam Z. Wyner, \u201cLegal Concepts Spin a Semantic Web\u201d, Law Technology News, http:\/\/www.law.com\/jsp\/lawtechnologynews10\/PubArticleLTN.jsp?id=1202431256007&slreturn=1<\/a> (June 8, 2009).\u00a0 Dr. N\u00faria Casellas gives a good explanation of the Semantic Web and ontologies:\u00a0Dr. N\u00faria\u00a0 Casellas, Semantic Enhancement of Legal Information: Are We Up for the Challenge? http:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/voxpop\/2010\/02\/15\/semantic-enhancement-of-legal-information%e2%80%a6-are-we-up-for-the-challenge\/<\/a> (February 15, 2010).<\/p>\n

[5] Christopher A. Welty and Jessica Jenkins, Formal Ontology for Subject, 31 Journal of Knowledge and Data Engineering 155 (1999) (also available at\u00a0 http:\/\/www.cs.vassar.edu\/~weltyc\/papers\/subjects\/subject.html<\/a>);\u00a0 Hope A. Olson, The Power to Name: Locating the Limits of Subject Representation in Libraries (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002); Knowledge Representation with Ontologies: Present Challenges – Future Possibilities, 65 International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 563 (2007), doi: 10.1016\/j.ijhcs.2007.04.003<\/a>.<\/p>\n

[6]\u00a0 \u201cIn the subfield of computer science and information science known as Knowledge Representation, the term ‘ontology’ refers to a consensual and reusable vocabulary of identified concepts and their relationships regarding some phenomena of the world, which is made explicit in a machine-readable language.\u00a0 Ontologies may be regarded as advanced taxonomical structures, where concepts are formalized as classes and defined with axioms, enriched with description of attributes or constraints, and properties.\u201d\u00a0 Dr. N\u00faria\u00a0 Casellas, Semantic Enhancement of legal Information: Are We Up for the Challenge? http:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/voxpop\/2010\/02\/15\/semantic-enhancement-of-legal-information%e2%80%a6-are-we-up-for-the-challenge\/<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0See also Dr. Adam Z. Wyner, \u201cLegal Concepts Spin a Semantic Web\u201d, Law Technology News, http:\/\/www.law.com\/jsp\/lawtechnologynews10\/PubArticleLTN.jsp?id=1202431256007&slreturn=1<\/a> (June 8, 2009) (suggesting Web-based collaborative ontology development where legal professionals contribute to a free, open ontology for law); Dr. Adam Z. Wyner, Weaving the Legal Semantic Web with Natural Language Processing, VoxPopuLII<\/em>, http:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/voxpop\/2010\/05\/17\/weaving-the-legal-semantic-web-with-natural-language-processing\/<\/a> (May 17, 2010).<\/p>\n

[7] Bill Cope, Mary Kalantzis and Liam Magee, Towards a Semantic Web: Connecting Knowledge in Academic Research (Chandos Publishing 2011), at 72 (noting several studies on investigating approaches and software); A Holistic Approach to Collaborative Ontology Development Based on Change Management, 9 Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on the World Wide Web 299 (2011), doi:10.1016\/j.websem.2011.06.007<\/a>; \u201cOntologies can be designed by means of methods such as\u2026encompassing top-down expertise elicitation from humans, bottom-up learning from documents, and middle-out application of design patterns, which can be specialized from domain-independent ontologies, extracted from best practices, existing ontologies or other knowledge sources, as well as learnt from conceptual invariances found in experts\u2019 documents.\u201d Aldo Gangemi, \u201cIntroducing Pattern-Based Design for Legal Ontologies,\u201d in Joost Breuker, Pompeu Casanovas, Michel C.A. Klein and Enrico Francesconi, eds., Law, Ontologies and the Semantic Web: Channelling the Information Flood (IOS Press, 2009), at 53.<\/p>\n

[8] Enrico Francesconi, Semantic Processing of Legal Texts: Where the Language of Law Meets the Law of Language (Springer 2008).<\/p>\n

[9]\u00a0 \u201cCreating and developing ontologies requires domain expertise and the ability to capture this knowledge in a clean conceptual model.\u201d Roberta Cruel, Olga Morozova, Markus Rhode, Elena Simperl, Katharina Siorapes, Oksana Tokarchuk, Torben Wiedenhoefer, and Fahri Yetim, Motivation Mechanisms for Participation in Human-Driven Semantic Content Creation, 1 International Journal of Knowledge Engineering and Data Mining 331 (2011), doi: 10.1504\/IJKEDM.2011.040653<\/a>.<\/p>\n

[10] This approach of working with faculty and other scholars from the legal academy would be similar to the \u201csocio-legal\u201d referenced by Dr. Casellas in her post regarding her Institute of Law and Technology project.\u00a0 Dr. Adam Z. Wyner\u00a0 has also advocated web-based collaborative ontolology development where legal professionals contribute to a free, open ontology for law. Dr. Adam Z. Wyner, \u201cLegal Concepts Spin a Semantic Web\u201d, Law Technology News, http:\/\/www.law.com\/jsp\/lawtechnologynews10\/PubArticleLTN.jsp?id=1202431256007&slreturn=1<\/a> (June 8, 2009).<\/p>\n

[11] Stephanie Davidson,\u00a0 Way Beyond Legal Research: Understanding the Research Habits of Legal Scholars, 102 Law Library Journal 561 (2010),\u00a0 http:\/\/www.aallnet.org\/main-menu\/Publications\/llj\/LLJ-Archives\/Vol-102\/publljv102n04\/2010-32.pdf<\/a>; Richard A. Danner, Supporting Scholarship: Thoughts on the Role of the Academic Librarian, 39 Journal of Law & Education 365-386 (2010), http:\/\/scholarship.law.duke.edu\/faculty_scholarship\/2071\/<\/a> .<\/p>\n

[12] Robert Richards, Legal Information Systems & Legal Informatics Resources: Knowledge Representation: Legal (Selected) http:\/\/www.personal.psu.edu\/rcr5122\/Ontologies.html<\/a>; Robert Richards, Legal Information Systems & Legal Informatics Resources: General Resources for Application to Law,\u00a0 http:\/\/www.personal.psu.edu\/rcr5122\/OntologiesGeneral.html<\/a>; Joost Breuker, Pompeu Casanovas, Michael C.A. Klein, and Enrico Francesconi, eds., Law, Ontologies and the Semantic Web: Channeling the Legal Information Flood (IOS Press 2009), at 12 (table of 23 ontologies).<\/p>\n

[13] Alan Ruttenberg et al., Life Sciences on the Semantic Web: The Neurocommons and Beyond. Briefings in Bioinformatics, 10(2): 193-204 (2009), doi: 10.1093\/bib\/bbp004<\/a> (\u201cThe NeuroCommons project seeks to make all scientific research materials – research articles, knowledge bases, research data, physical materials – as available and as usable as they can be. We do this by fostering practices that render information in a form that promotes uniform access by computational agents – sometimes called ‘interoperability’. We want knowledge sources to combine easily and meaningfully, enabling semantically precise queries that span multiple information sources.\u201d).<\/p>\n

[14] Benjamin Keele and Michelle Pearse, How Law Libraries Can Help Law Journals Publish Better (poster session presented during the 2011 AALL Annual Meeting in Philadelphia, PA on July 23-26, 2011, http:\/\/scholarship.law.wm.edu\/libpubs\/25\/<\/a>).<\/p>\n

[15] Tom Boone,\u00a0 Librarians Key to Open Access Law Reviews, http:\/\/tomboone.com\/library-laws\/2009\/09\/librarians-key-open-access-electronic-law-reviews<\/a> (September 3, 2009).<\/p>\n

[16] NISO\/DCMI, International Bibliographic Standards, Linked Data and the Impact on Library Cataloging (Webinar), http:\/\/www.niso.org\/news\/events\/2011\/dcmi\/linked<\/a> (August 24, 2011).<\/p>\n

[17] Valeri Craigle, Legal Scholarship in the Digital Domain: A Technical Roadmap for Implementing the Durham Statement, Technical Services Law Librarian, at 1 (December 2010), http:\/\/www.library.illinois.edu\/archives\/e-records\/aall\/8501591a\/news\/TSLLdecember2010.pdf<\/a>.<\/p>\n

[18] See Dr. Adam Z. Wyner, \u201cLegal Concepts Spin a Semantic Web,\u201d Law Technology News, http:\/\/www.law.com\/jsp\/lawtechnologynews10\/PubArticleLTN.jsp?id=1202431256007&slreturn=1<\/a> (June 8, 2009) (suggesting Web-based collaborative ontology development where legal professionals contribute to a free, open ontology for law).<\/p>\n

[19]\u00a0 Wayne Miller, A Foundational Proposal for Making the Durham Statement Real,\u00a0 http:\/\/scholarship.law.duke.edu\/faculty_scholarship\/2325\/<\/a> (suggesting founding an organization \u201cwhose mission is to guarantee the ongoing viability and availability of all publications that adhere to the Durham Statement\u2019s call to action, hereinafter called the Durham Statement Foundation.\u201d);\u00a0 Richard A. Danner, Kelly Leong and Wayne Miller, The Durham Statement Two Years Later: Open Access in the Law School Journal Environment, 103 Law Library Journal 39, 52 (2011), http:\/\/scholarship.law.duke.edu\/faculty_scholarship\/2358\/<\/a> (noting that the Durham Statement \u201ccalls for law schools to end print publication in a planned and coordinated effort led by the legal education community\u201d).<\/p>\n

[20]\u00a0 Some examples include the Northeast Foreign Law Libraries Cooperative Group and\u00a0 \u201cB2F2\u201d (currently in the process of being the process of being renamed) with Boston area law librarians.<\/p>\n

[21] John Wilbanks, \u201cLicensing and Ontologies: Research from Creative Commons,\u201d\u00a0 http:\/\/ontolog.cim3.net\/file\/work\/IPR\/OOR-IPR-01_IPR-landscape_2010-09-09\/licensing-n-ontologies–JohnWilbanks-CC_20100909.pdf<\/a> (September 9, 2010).<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Michelle Pearse<\/a><\/strong> is the Research Librarian for Open Access Initiatives and Scholarly Communication at the Harvard Law School Library<\/a> where she manages implementation of the law school\u2019s open access policy for its faculty, and other projects related to scholarly communication and open access to legal information and scholarship.\u00a0 She is also involved in efforts to\u00a0archive born-digital content for the collection, and provides research services to faculty and staff.<\/p>\n

VoxPopuLII is edited by Judith Pratt.<\/a> Editor-in-Chief is Robert Richards<\/a>, to whom queries should be directed. The statements above are not legal advice or legal representation. If you require legal advice, consult a lawyer. Find a lawyer<\/a> in the Cornell LII Lawyer Directory<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over the past couple of years, there has been a great deal of discussion — particularly in relation to the Durham Statement [1] — about technical standards and preservation issues for law reviews that publish openly and exclusively online. \u00a0 Other colleagues have already blogged or written more formally about the lack of metadata being […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[294,329,295,488,296,589,465,293],"tags":[633,4822,4823,4824,4821,4825],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/voxpop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1806"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/voxpop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/voxpop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/voxpop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/voxpop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1806"}],"version-history":[{"count":56,"href":"https:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/voxpop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1806\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1873,"href":"https:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/voxpop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1806\/revisions\/1873"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/voxpop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1806"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/voxpop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1806"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/voxpop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1806"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}