{"id":3622,"date":"2014-06-16T13:15:58","date_gmt":"2014-06-16T18:15:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/voxpop\/?p=3622"},"modified":"2014-06-16T13:15:58","modified_gmt":"2014-06-16T18:15:58","slug":"openlaws","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/voxpop\/2014\/06\/16\/openlaws\/","title":{"rendered":"openlaws"},"content":{"rendered":"
The other day a friend came to me because he heard about the openlaws.eu<\/a> project. He said:\u00a0“Hey, openlaws sounds great – does that mean that I can write my own laws now?”. I had to tell him no, but that it was almost as good as that…<\/strong><\/p>\n So what is openlaws then?\u00a0openlaws aims at opening access to existing legal information systems and proactively involving and integrating its target groups, i.e. communities of individuals and businesses, legal professionals and public bodies. Open innovation, mass customization, big data analysis, social features and social networks are already highly successful in other markets and we want to introduce them in the legal domain on a European scale. Based on open data, open source software and open innovation principles the project adds a \u201csocial layer\u201d to the existing \u201cinstitutional layer\u201d of legal information systems.<\/p>\n Or to keep it simple: openlaws will help you find legal information more easily,\u00a0organize\u00a0it the way you want and share it with others.<\/p>\n EU Project<\/strong><\/p>\n openlaws is an EU project which is co-financed by the European Union<\/a>. It was ranked by DG Justice #1<\/a> among almost 100 submitted proposals from institutions all over Europe.\u00a0The project started in April 2014 and will last until March 2016.\u00a0The two main objectives of openlaws are:<\/p>\n The endeavour will help Europe to innovate in the legal field, provide better access for individuals, businesses, legal experts and public bodies, and create a network between them. \u00a0openlaws is in line with the European e-Justice Action Plan<\/a> and the Europe 2020 growth strategy<\/a>, including the Digital Agenda<\/a> and the Innovative Union<\/a>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The following institutions participate in the project as the core team:<\/p>\n However, following an open innovation approach, other institutions and individuals are invited to join the openlaws initiative and to contribute to this “social layer” for legal information.<\/p>\n Source: European Commission, About Open Innovation, https:\/\/ec.europa.eu\/digital-agenda\/node\/50612<\/p><\/div>\n So what is the problem?<\/strong><\/p>\n Legal texts are basic information of all democratic states. As such legal information must be accessible to all members of society to the widest possible extent, to aid inclusiveness and to enable participation in public decision-making. In recognition of this, the EU and its Member States work to make laws, court decisions, etc, publicly available on line. Much has been achieved locally already. However, the sheer mass of legal norms, instruments and interpretations in courts decisions, commentaries and other sources, makes it increasingly difficult for citizens, civil society, businesses and all involved in legal practices to locate the relevant law. The challenge for the future is to link local legal information and have in place structures to enrich it through aggregation and mass customization. The technological possibilities to achieve this are there. Openlaws.eu<\/a> aims to initiate a platform and develop a vision for Big Open Legal Data (BOLD): an open framework for legislation, case law, and legal literature from across Europe. This contributes to better access to legal information and ultimately to better governance, both of which support higher social welfare goals.<\/p>\n Today, a huge amount of legal information remains published and administered by a limited number of organizations, typically in closed structures in public authorities and public-private partnerships. This includes the management of legal metadata, which is the basis for automated processing. Legal scholars and practitioners publish mainly through traditional, highly specialized, commercial publishing or isolated websites. Back-channels are limited, and there is little space for contributions from wider communities. Fully automated processing of legal data is not yet possible. Strikingly, whereas in many domains such as statistics, spatial information, and life sciences research data, open information infrastructures are rapidly developing, this is not the case for legal information. This project\u2019s aim is to help build and promote an open ICT environment (using existing tools and sources, like EUR-Lex<\/a>, the European e-Justice System<\/a>, e-Codex<\/a>, national databases, etc.) so that all stakeholders can benefit from it (e.g. additional metadata, data curation, etc.).<\/p>\n The target groups for openlaws are:<\/p>\n The following activities are planned to be done by the openlaws core team until March 2016:<\/p>\n In the first phase, the core team will integrate databases from the EU, the UK, the Netherlands and from Austria. It will be possible to connect also databases from other countries via open interfaces (APIs). If you have a suggestion for a database that should be included, please contact us<\/a>. Of course, it would be great if you could help us with the integration of such database!<\/p>\n Adding a social layer to existing databases<\/strong><\/p>\n openlaws will enable users to assert their rights throughout the EU by making access to justice much easier and more open by adding a \u201csocial layer\u201d:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The openlaws core team<\/strong><\/p>\n The openlaws core team members are an interdisciplinary group of universities and SMEs from leading e-government member states. The University of Amsterdam and the University of Sussex are specialized in legal informatics, comparative law and governance. The London School of Economics and Political Science will cover the socio-economic part, while the Salzburg University of Applied Science will provide the system architecture. The Italian software SME Alpenite srl and the Austrian BY WASS GmbH, who are building the Austrian mobile legal information system together, will be in charge of the implementation, the dissemination and the user community engagement.<\/p>\n Summary<\/strong><\/p>\n My friend liked the idea and the concept of openlaws. Linking legislation, case law, legal literature and legal experts made sense for him. But when he wanted to see the platform, I had to tell him: “We have just started with the basic architecture of openlaws.eu<\/a> and it will still take a while until a first prototype is ready…”<\/p>\n He looked disappointed: “So I will forget openlaws for now until it is live?”\u00a0But the answer to that is: “No – get in contact with us now right at the beginning of the project! We need your ideas and your contribution and we are grateful for feedback!”<\/p>\n Why should you contact \u00a0us?<\/p>\n How can you contact us?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Dr. Clemens Wass, MBL, MBA <\/b>has obtained degrees in law, business law and business administration (with a specialization on entrepreneurship and innovation). He has ten years of practical experience in the area of law and legal informatics. Before becoming self-employed at BY WASS GmbH, he has been working for the University of Salzburg at the Institute for Comparative Law and for the IT companies SONY and SKIDATA. He is external lecturer at the Vienna University of Economics and Business and has published several papers in the area of legal informatics and information law.\u00a0He has published the Austria RIS:App, which is the official mobile platform to Austrian legislation:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n VoxPopuLII is edited by Judith Pratt<\/a>. Editors-in-Chief are Stephanie Davidson<\/a> and Christine Kirchberger<\/a>, to whom queries should be directed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The other day a friend came to me because he heard about the openlaws.eu project. He said:\u00a0“Hey, openlaws sounds great – does that mean that I can write my own laws now?”. I had to tell him no, but that it was almost as good as that…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":117,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[521,360,466,345,356,4707,4820,212,232,488,353,354,4928,352],"tags":[4989,4957,4958,640,4938,4959,4956],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/voxpop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3622"}],"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\/117"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/voxpop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3622"}],"version-history":[{"count":30,"href":"https:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/voxpop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3622\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3655,"href":"https:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/voxpop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3622\/revisions\/3655"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/voxpop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3622"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/voxpop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3622"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/voxpop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3622"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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