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We're planning on adding regulations and statutes, and the annotation platform should generally work for these texts as well. As you noted, there's a version co

We're planning on adding regulations and statutes, and the annotation platform should generally work for these texts as well. As you noted, there's a version control issue, and we're still thinking about the best way to deal with it. One possibility would be to have the text appear as a redline, which would make keeping all annotations alongside the text possible. Alternatively or in addition, we could have a revision history of the text (allowing you to view and compare older versions) -- then, the easiest way to manage annotations might be to keep annotations for paragraphs that haven't changed in the newer version, but to have annotations for changed paragraphs only appear in the older versions.

adelevie 13y ago
Regulations and rulemaking info would be very useful for the area of law I'm interested in. Though annotations would be a great addition, I think just having a simple UX for searching and accessing these documents (Orders, filed comments, etc) would be a huge win. This is a problem I've been working on mostly as a hobby to scratch my own itch, and I'd be happy to discuss what I've learned. One big pitfall I've noticed with taming regulatory data is that often each agency has its data siloed differently. Regulations.gov has been great for harmonizing many, many agencies, but here's a list of all the agencies that are currently "non-participating": http://www.regulations.gov/docs/Non_Participating_Agencies.pdf http://www.regulations.gov/docs/Non_Participating_Agencies.p.... This means you'd need a parser/scraper for each agency, assuming its rulemaking data is even made available in a sane format (like a spreadsheet). Anyways, best of luck. Successfully wrangling legal data seems more difficult than building the Hyperloop.
- joannahuey 13y ago
  Thanks for the information! It'd be great to chat some more about what you've found out.
matthewmcg 13y ago
Nice--as the above poster notes, linking statutes and their interpreting rules and regs. in a sensible way could be a nice differentiator. E.g. if a regulation or another code section gives a special definition for a term used in the statute, it shouldn't be too hard to generate a default annotation linking to that definition, especially if you're already doing this for inline citations in cases. Definitions are not as uniform as citations, but they are still pretty formulaic. "_________ shall mean ________" etc.
- joannahuey 13y ago
  That's a great idea, thanks!

adelevie 13y ago

Regulations and rulemaking info would be very useful for the area of law I'm interested in. Though annotations would be a great addition, I think just having a simple UX for searching and accessing these documents (Orders, filed comments, etc) would be a huge win. This is a problem I've been working on mostly as a hobby to scratch my own itch, and I'd be happy to discuss what I've learned. One big pitfall I've noticed with taming regulatory data is that often each agency has its data siloed differently. Regulations.gov has been great for harmonizing many, many agencies, but here's a list of all the agencies that are currently "non-participating": http://www.regulations.gov/docs/Non_Participating_Agencies.pdf http://www.regulations.gov/docs/Non_Participating_Agencies.p.... This means you'd need a parser/scraper for each agency, assuming its rulemaking data is even made available in a sane format (like a spreadsheet). Anyways, best of luck. Successfully wrangling legal data seems more difficult than building the Hyperloop.

joannahuey 13y ago
Thanks for the information! It'd be great to chat some more about what you've found out.

matthewmcg 13y ago

Nice--as the above poster notes, linking statutes and their interpreting rules and regs. in a sensible way could be a nice differentiator. E.g. if a regulation or another code section gives a special definition for a term used in the statute, it shouldn't be too hard to generate a default annotation linking to that definition, especially if you're already doing this for inline citations in cases. Definitions are not as uniform as citations, but they are still pretty formulaic. "_________ shall mean ________" etc.

joannahuey 13y ago
That's a great idea, thanks!