Thursday Thinkpiece: Poblet on Visualizing Legal Open Data

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Visualizing the law: Crisis mapping as an open tool for legal practice
Marta Poblet
Journal of Open Access to Law Vol 1, No 1 (2013)

(This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. This work, as excerpted, has not been altered.)

Excerpt pp. 3-6

2. Maps as Interfaces: Visualizing Legal Open Data
The adoption of open data principles is gaining momentum in the legal domain as part of a broader movement seeking greater transparency and accountability in government (Casanovas 2013, Casanovas 2012, Tiscornia and Fernandez-Barrera 2012). As governments, courts, and legal research institutions enable access and reuse of legal datasets under open licenses, new informational challenges arise: How can this information be appropriately linked to leverage interoperability and avoid data silos? How to make it digestible to users? The Linked Open Data (LOD) movement addresses the first question by working on standards, methods, and guidelines. The second question refers to usability issues challenging broader communities of data scientists, computer engineers, designers, journalists, artists, etc.

A number of initiatives and projects are currently focusing on visualization of open legal data using different tools. Two of them have been labeled as legal atlases. In the Netherlands, the Legal Atlas project uses Semantic Web technologies to merge geospatial data, textual data and controlled vocabularies in land use regulations (Hoekstra et al. 2010). The system can then answer users’ questions such as: “What activity is allowed here?” (idem). The second Legal Atlas is a recent initiative by several partners at the University of Montana who are developing an online platform to map legislation, legal decisions, domain experts, and other sources of national, supranational, and international law in a number of legal areas (agriculture, energy, natural resources, land, industry, and mining).[1] The Legal Atlas is also the technology provider of Capture the Ocean, an upcoming project “to map the law of data” with “easy-to-understand visualizations and maps, helping people understand the issues, services, and rules that are shaping the world around them”.[2]

Fig. 2: Legal topics in the Legal Atlas mapping platform

At Stanford University, researchers from the Stanford Social Network Analysis and the Law Program (SNALP) are using a different approach to visualize legal cases on international arbitration. The method here consists of applying social network analysis to a knowledge base of cases from institutions such as the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes, the Permanent Court of Arbitration, the UN administrative courts, and the World Trade Organization. The knowledge base contains up to 60,000 nodes and 80,000 relations. The project uses Gephi,[3] an open-source platform to visualize networks, and GEXF[4] (Graph Exchange XML Format) to describe complex networks structures, their associated data and the underlying dynamics.[5]

In Europe, researchers at the Institute of Law and Technology (IDT-UAB) working for the Menu for Justice Project[6] (an EU project involving 51 partners from different European countries) mapped more than 550 legal education institutions in Europe using Crowdmap, the web-based mapping platform developed by Ushahidi.[7] The dataset contains geo-located basic information (description of the institution, programs, link to the official website, etc.). The data was supplied by the large network of researchers and academics linked to the project through a “limited crowdsourcing” approach. Rather than making an open call to the general public to submit information on European legal education programs, researchers tapped into the legal expertise of the academic network to provide concise, accurate, and updated information. This approach facilitated the quality checks on the data by the managing team (e.g. information gaps, relevance, consistency, etc.) that larger crowdsourced projects typically require. The resulting dataset can also be exported to other applications in different formats as a first step towards a comprehensive European open dataset of legal education institutions and programs.

Fig. 4: Legal Education in Europe (Menu for Justice Project)

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1 Available at: http://legal-atlas.net/.
2 Available at: http://www.capturetheocean.com/about.
3 Available at: http://gephi.org/.
4 Available at: http://gexf.net/format/.
5 Enric Garcia Torrents (e-mail communication). See also Puig (forthcoming, 2014).
6 See The Menu for Justice Project aims to provide guidelines on the potential contents of a homogeneous curriculum studiorum in judicial and legal studies, based on previous research form partners (e.g. Poblet and Casanovas 2005). Available at: https://www.academic- projects.eu/menuforjustice/default.aspx.
7 Available at: https://legaleducationineurope.crowdmap.com/.