Hacking Challenge #3: Open Law Glossary of Terms "An Urban Dictionary for the Law"
Greg Elin edited this page Oct 7, 2013
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10 revisions
Waldo Jaquith, Eric Mill, Greg Elin, Peter Brantley, Balazs Czifra
- There's only one public domain machine-readable glossary of legal and civic terms—The State Decoded's tiny, 500-term glossary in JSON, that individual states/deployments can extend. This is used to power hover definitions for terms in State Decoded websites, such as the Virginia Code.
- Anyone involved in the legal community or "government stuff"
- Sunlight Foundation
- State Decoded/City Decoded Instances
- FastCase/legal data producers
- A pleasant, readable one-sentence phrase defining each legal term
- An (optional) extended definition
- An (optional) list of synonyms
- Use prose.io for editing (for example)
- Crowdsourced definitions for those that don't already exist
- Raw data goes on GitHub—what you do with it is up to user and application needs
- Differing definitions at different levels of government, in different contexts. One proposal: preface context/jurisdiction specific definitions with text such as: "In the state of Virginia", or "In Montgomery County, MD".
- Not being able to take copyright-restricted sources (like Wikipedia) or law books/dictionaries
- Building the platform to power the crowdsourcing. How do people actually submit their suggested definitions and how are those reviewed? Needs to be as approachable, non-scary and easy on the UI/UX side, if you're going to get folks to crowdsource.
- Start with the glossary at github.com/statedecoded/legal-dictionary, but using the github.com/unitedstates/glossary repository and format
- Make the definition files auto-transform into data (JSON) upon contribution (wire up a small app on e.g. Heroku that receives Github post-push hooks)
- Integrate it somewhere in the real world
- (Optional) Embed prose.io into the project (don't use the hosted version), and extend it to display contribution guidelines and integrate live validation
- (Optional) Automatically validate proposed contributions, using Github's Travis integration, so pull requests show whether or not guidelines are met
- Encourage others to adopt approach for other glossaries, like GitMachines glossary
- This group would love to get their hands on a great list of legal synonyms
- Fastcase has a massive search history, for frequently searched terms, etc.
- What about partnering with a law school to do this?