The Semantic Web and Legal Information: Knight and Sutherland

This year’s CALL/ACBD conference ended about two weeks ago, and we’ve seen a few posts on impressions of the conference and selected sessions.

A frequent highlight is the pre-conference workshop and the opportunity it offers to dive deeply into a topic in which colleagues specialize. This year, as noted previously on Slaw, F. Tim Knight of Osgoode’s library and Sarah Sutherland of CanLII offered a timely presentation on the semantic web and legal information.

I wasn’t able to attend it because of another commitment. However, thanks to the institutional repository at York, Creative Commons licensing, and—most notably—the generosity and sharing commitment of the presenters, I can have a peek at what was learned during that workshop.

Tim recently uploaded their work to the institutional repository at his school and he and Sarah widely shared a link to its record, containing an abstract, description, and links to the files themselves: Along with the slides, he graciously posted his speaking notes for context. Further, all of this work is shared with a Creative Commons license: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Canada.

More information about their work is available in Sarah’s earlier post about the CALL/ACBD KF Modified committee linked data project to which it relates. Tim and Sarah were awarded a CALL/ACBD research grant this year to investigate and advance this linked data and legal information initiative.