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The entire US Code is now online in XML

uscodebeta.house.gov

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Re: The entire US Code is now online in XML

#191

Post by muricuh »

rottyguy wrote: post #31
bjr- wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The law can be interpreted as a set of rules matched against an action in a particular context to determine whether said action is legal. Right now lots of people do this manually. Maybe computers can do it better. If computers can do it better, maybe people could focus on writing new laws and refactoring old ones instead of repeatedly interpreting old laws for each case.

RobotWars for Lawyers invariably leading to digitizing the whole judicial process.

Fuck yeah!

Re: The entire US Code is now online in XML

#192

Post by mindcrime »

tmoertel wrote: post #65
mindcrime wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In practice, it probably doesn't make any difference. Assuming, for the sake of argument, that XSD is expressive enough to allow the authors to say what they're trying to say, in an unambiguous way, it's more or less a moot point. RELAX/NG is awesome, sure... but to some extent the "war" between it and XSD is a religious war. Pretty much every popular & widely used language / platform has XSD support... hell, it's so…

The tragic part isn't that the schema is given in XSD but that it's defined in XSD. What I'm lamenting (yes more hyperbole) is that a schema this important wasn't defined in a schema language that had clear semantics and composability rules, fostering reuse and adoption for related domains, of which we would expect there to be many. (Later, of course, the definition could always be extruded into XSD and other popular…

Fair enough. I haven't really dug into this schema in detail yet, but I'm guessing that XSD is expressive enough, and that - worst case - somebody could define an equivalent schema in $WHATEVER, and mirror the data after tranforming it. It's not a perfect setup, but at least it might make the content more usable for some purposes.

I'm kinda curious to see what can be done with it in terms of transforming to RDF triples myself, but time will tell...

Re: The entire US Code is now online in XML

#193

Post by proggR »

vog wrote: post #139

I find it amusing that here in Germany, we have that for years: http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/ All laws are available in XML, HTML, PDF, etc. The site also provides an RSS feed. In addition, some enthusiasts regularily download stuff from there and apply those to a Git repository: https://github.com/bundestag/gesetze That way, this repository contains not only the current laws, but also the history of how the law…

I actually wrote a tumblr post about that a while ago. It also included a user engagement aspect that would allow users to subscribe to topics of interest to receive a curated feed of changes that could each have a dialogue/poll emerge. I hadn't really thought through the specifics but its awesome to know that something like this is already started to some degree. Thanks for that!

Here's the post if interested.

http://proggr.tumblr.com/post/52801512630/githubberment

Re: The entire US Code is now online in XML

#195

Post by genwin »

jacques_chester wrote: post #170
OldSchool wrote: post #53

Caveat for for many of us overly rational thinkers: the powers that be deliberately are allowed to 'interpret' this code nondeterministically by many different means including its 'spirit,' admissibility of relevant information, manipulation of venue and participants, apparently even extrajudicial proceedings lately. In short, that allows a lawyer to answer almost any question with "it depends," and start billing.

With respect, only someone who hasn't studied law could say this. Law is complicated and filled with ambiguity because the world is complicated and filled with ambiguity. Unlike lawyers, we can simply will some of that away. We can make an enum which smooshes together disparate phenomena, that feeds a dropdown list and require the customers to use it. We can ignore very rare corner cases and include a comments field.…

> Law is complicated and filled with ambiguity because the world is complicated and filled with ambiguity.

True, yet I'm convinced by obvious ambiguity that it's on purpose, to feed the legal industry. That conviction is bolstered by all the "work" Congress does on reviving sunset clauses on laws that had no good reason to sunset.

Re: The entire US Code is now online in XML

#197

Post by jacques_chester »

genwin wrote: post #195
jacques_chester wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With respect, only someone who hasn't studied law could say this. Law is complicated and filled with ambiguity because the world is complicated and filled with ambiguity. Unlike lawyers, we can simply will some of that away. We can make an enum which smooshes together disparate phenomena, that feeds a dropdown list and require the customers to use it. We can ignore very rare corner cases and include a comments field.…

> Law is complicated and filled with ambiguity because the world is complicated and filled with ambiguity. True, yet I'm convinced by obvious ambiguity that it's on purpose, to feed the legal industry. That conviction is bolstered by all the "work" Congress does on reviving sunset clauses on laws that had no good reason to sunset.

Again, I must insist that folk can only take this view because they have not studied law.

Law's complexity is not by design. Much of case law and legislation is about refactoring existing principles into something simpler.

The complexity of law is emergent from the problem domain. It doesn't require a conspiracy against the public to be that way. It merely requires the existence of a sufficiently large and diverse public.

Re: The entire US Code is now online in XML

#198

Post by DannyBee »

azernik wrote: post #133
DannyBee wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still recreating a word based diff from a line based diff. See diff.c line 793 for how it works.

It may be doing that conversion, but the conversion works. For example, committing the following text (with line breaks), then joining it all into one line, shows no differences when using 'git diff --word-diff'. Test the first. This will check if reflowing text actually produces git word-diff weirdness, or if it's actually decent. The line does get reproduced on the terminal (a line diff was seen), but no text is sh…

Sure, but this particular test tells you nothing. You need one where the "line diff" has identified the wrong set of changes (IE it has decided two sets of text look close enough that one is really a change into the other, even though that's not what historically happened).

Re: The entire US Code is now online in XML

#199

Post by saraid216 »

bliker wrote: post #127
DannyBee wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember that diff is an algorithm to generate the smallest set of operations to produce version B from version A, not an accurate reconstruction of what happened. Diff algorithms are also often tuned not try as hard to find the smallest set of changes for larger documents, due to speed concerns.

I did some work & research about diffs when I tried to visualise progression of slovak law. My best attempt was a diff method that would understand the inner structure of the law. I ended up with simple draft but I am sure somebody more competent could look into that.

> I ended up with simple draft but I am sure somebody more competent could look into that.

If nothing prevents you, you ought to throw this up for others to see. Worst comes to worst, no one finds it useful.

Re: The entire US Code is now online in XML

#200

Post by saraid216 »

jacques_chester wrote: post #178
DannyBee wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, you wouldn't. This is the US code, not the legislative info :) I actually tried to create this once (with a team behind me, in fact) with what's available or possible with the legislative info. THOMAS theoretically published in XML, but it's missing a lot of info. Not only is this info not published, it's not even stored. They still are literally passing bills around to each other in some cases. You'd have…

The US system of legislative development is quite flawed. There are a lot of places where changes can be made without attribution, emerging from committees without saying who added what. In most Parliamentary democracies you can only propose amendments from one of the two chambers, so any amendment can always be traced to the Parliamentarian who moved it.

I'd support having a nice and loud discussion on doing this. Being able to trace the authorship of line items doesn't seem to have stopped pork in other countries, but it might mitigate it. And we'd be able to yell at people better.
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