Hi Everyone,
I'm a law student at Lewis & Clark Law School and a techie as well.
Because of the great efforts last year by people to open up access to
Oregon's statutes, I was able to start two months ago developing a
website and research platform based on them:
http://www.OregonLaws.org
My first priority is readability and good user experience. But I'm
also experimenting with making further, new uses of the existing
information, like;
A smart, semantically aware search visualization and filtering:
http://blog.oregonlaws.org/2009/03/new-search-visualization-and-filtering/
new views of the information that didn't necessarily exist before.
(Here, overview of a "Volume")
http://www.oregonlaws.org/ors_volumes/3
A unified glossary of Oregon legal terms, by combining the hundreds of
small "Definitions" sections. (This one is very experimental.
Although it's possible to do, I'm not sure if it's valuable.)
http://www.oregonlaws.org/glossary_terms
ORS statutes via IM:
http://blog.oregonlaws.org/2009/03/introducing-the-law-robot/
I've taken the approach of first fully parsing the official documents
down to the smallest meaningful entities. These pieces are used to
create an "object model", which provides the information for building
the presentation, be it web pages, or IM chat messages.
Feedback and critique is totally welcome!
Thanks,
Robb