Legislation : Proposed extension

[tfrancart]

Update : see extension v3 below (09 november 2016)

A proposed extension to describe Legislation within schema.org has been published at http://legal.eli-legislation-schemaorg.appspot.com/Legislation.
Additional material and use-cases description can be found on the extension page (examples still needed). The proposal was announced on the mailing-list.

The extension includes the following classes and enumerations :

• Legislation (subclass of CreativeWork) "A legal act or a component of a legal act (like an article).", with 24 new properties.
• LegislationObject (subclass of Legislation and MediaObject) "A specific object or file containing a Legislation. Note that the same Legislation can be published in multiple files. For example, a digitally signed PDF, a plain PDF and an HTML version."
• LegalValueLevel "A list of possible levels for the legal validity of a legislation."
• LegalForceStatus "A list of possible statuses for the legal force of a legislation."

The diagram below gives an outline of the extension :

This extension proposal comes with suggestions to improve the core schema :

• Add "Legislation" as subclass of CreativeWork #1154 Add "Legislation" as subclass of CreativeWork in the core schema
• Create an inverse property for schema:citation (schema:citedBy) #1031 Create inverse property of schema:citation
• Improve the definition of MediaObject  #1153 Improve the definition of MediaObject
• Improve definition of property "encodingFormat" (vs "fileFormat") #1155 Improve the definition of encodingFormat
• schema:encodesCreativeWork should be declared inverse of schema:encoding #1030 encodesCreativeWork should be made inverse of encoding
• per-Property, per-enumerated-value pages should show acknowledgements (and multiple should be possible) #1022 allow proper credits to properties and enumeration
• Broaden the range of schema:version from Number to Text #1151 broaden the range of property schema:version to allow Text
• Add a generic "relatedWork" property to relate CreativeWork together #1152 add a generic property "relatedTo" to relate CreativeWorks

This extension is adapted from the European Legislation Identifier (ELI) ontology. The ELI development is driven by national legal publishers of some European countries, and by European institutions, all aiming at identifying, describing and linking legislation on the web. For more information on ELI, see the ELI register.

We would love to get feedback from the community on this proposal to improve the description of legislation with schema.org. Our objective is that this proposal be integrated either as a hosted extension, or even in the core.

[danbri]

Thanks for the comprehensive proposal! One of the best documented we've received :)

[tfrancart]

Thanks, we hope this can make it through to become a hosted extension, then !
As indicated on the mailing list I can repackage this if needed as pull request(s), "pending" extension, branches, split things, etc. Just let me know what would be the easiest to progress.

[johndann]

Hi Thomas, Hi Dan,
Just a short message to support the Extension, for a lot of Official Journal it would be very important this issue goes through. Easy access and better search facilities would be essential to provide a better service to civil society and businesses.
John

[danbri]

I'm inclined to explore this as a foundation for something like "legal.schema.org" covering both the description of legislation but also other aspects e.g. case law / court documents, which @stuartrobinson and others have been looking into. That would be consistent with what we've done for the medical/health parts of schema.org, which have recently moved into a fairly broad "health-lifesci.schema.org" area that provides room for related schemas to also be added. How does that sound?

[tfrancart]

I have nothing against a broader "legal.schema.org" extension, with legislation as a basis. However the legislation part should move forward without waiting for other topics to be finalized; from the point of view of the ELI initiative, the sooner the legislation proposal is discussed, the better.

How do you think we can make progress on this ? (I can rework the proposal to use "legal.schema.org" instead of "legislation.schema.org", if needed).

On case law / courts, the ECLI metadata set (http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/GA/TXT/?uri=celex:52011XG0429%2801%29) - derived from DC - can be taken as a starting point or source of inspiration.

[akuckartz]

As noted in #980 (comment) this is also related to #448. For the moment I simply refer to http://www.popoloproject.com/ to demonstrate what kind of data these efforts are about,

[johndann]

Hi Dan,

It would be interesting to broaden the scope to other parts, but it will take a considerate amount of time to finish that work.
There is a an good understanding and agreement on the "legislation" part - the solution proposed by Thomas is of course discussed at a broader level with quite a lot of Member States within the Official Journals - and we would like to move forward.

Could there be different sub-parts of "Legal.schema.org" e.g. Legislation, case law, court documents etc ... which could advance at is own pace ?

Thanks,
John

[mwkuster]

Hi Dan, John,

having timely support for a Legislation class in schema.org is of great interest for the publication of European legislation by the Publications Office of the European Union.

Covering all things legal in one go risks to be complex and take a long time, as the concrete challenges of, e.g. case law or doctrine would all already have to be analyzed at this stage. For this reason I agree with John here that the best strategy is to agree on support for legislation first and then think about extensions to other types of legal resources in response to concrete use cases.

Best regards

Marc (Küster)

[tfrancart]

Hello

As @danbri suggested, I have renamed the extension from "legislation.schema.org" to "legal.schema.org", and updated the RDFa accordingly. The correct link to it is now http://legal.eli-legislation-schemaorg.appspot.com/Legislation.

To make concrete progress on this, I propose that :

• the "Legislation" type be integrated in the core schema;
• the rest of the proposed extension be discussed either here or on joinup or on the extension issue tracker on Github; maybe a subset of the extension can be integrated first and the more problematic features/properties can be left for tuture versions ?

Cheers