Presentation at ICT4D Seminar at Computer Science Department, UCT
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The document summarizes the work of the African Legal Information Institute (AfricanLII) in providing free access to legal information from African countries. It discusses how AfricanLII digitizes and processes legal documents, stores them using the Legal Information Institute in a Box platform, and disseminates the information through its website and mobile apps. It aims to address the lack of reliable and up-to-date access to African law by building a network of legal contributors and making over 150,000 documents openly available online to help legal research and transactions.
Presentation at ICT4D Seminar at Computer Science Department, UCT
- 1. Free Access to Legal Information from Africa Mariya Badeva-Bright AfricanLII Project Director mariyab@africanlii.org
- 2. • No reliable, consistent and up-to-date access to the law of African countries Affected, among others: • the cost of doing legal research in Africa, including for academics and students • the settlement of legal cases and completion of transactions for SMEs • investment climate for larger businesses • regional integration Access to African Law
- 4. Successes • Unprecedented number of African judgments and legislation openly available via the Internet • Built a solid network of legal information correspondents in Africa • Standards adopted to ensure comprehensiveness and completeness of available open law • Partnerships established between justice sector stakeholders nationally and regionally
- 5. Some statistics • Usage growth between 3% and 150% over the past year • Estimated over 250,000 unique visitors per month to all African LIIs • Over 150,000 documents available online (started with 700) • Visitors from South Africa and the Region, as well as international: United States, the Netherlands, Australia, China, Great Britain, Germany, France, Russia, Canada, Israel, etc.
- 6. Legal Informatics Legal informatics is an area within information science. Erdelez and O’Hare (1997) define legal informatics as follows: The American Library Association defines informatics as “the study of the structure and properties of information, as well as the application of technology to the organization, storage, retrieval, and dissemination of information.” Legal informatics therefore, pertains to the application of informatics within the context of the legal environment and as such involves law- related organizations (e.g., law offices, courts, and law schools) and users of information and information technologies within these organizations. (Quoted in Paliwala, History of Legal Informatics http://ejlt.org/article/view/21/38)
- 7. Legal Informatics @ AfricanLII • Digitize information • Process and store information specialized legal information • Disseminate information • Search
- 8. Background • Analogue medium, lack of consistent analogue or digital archives • Poor IT skills at content source • Lack of strong software development and maintenance skills in Africa • Lack of fast and accessible links to the Internet • Perceived high cost of development and maintenance • User information retrieval literacy
- 9. Digitization
- 10. If we are lucky … http://www.sierralii.org/files/sl/legislation/act/197 4/21/1974_21_pdf_20098.pdf ● OCR software ● Heavy on human input ● Advocacy and working with governement can address
- 11. Process information ● Indigo Legislation Platform Indigo is an open source web platform for the consolidation and publication of legislation. Make it easier to capture & publish well structured legislation to facilitate free access to law.
- 12. From Analogue to AkomaNtoso XML
- 13. From XML to This
- 15. Store and Disseminate Legal Information Institute (LII) in a Box The LII-in-a-Box provides: 1. Consumers of free legal information with a satisfactory and predictable user experience on desktop and mobile devices, based on industry standards for legal information publishing 2. System administrators with an easy and quick to set-up and maintain, no-cost, Drupal distribution for legal information publishing 3. Content editors of free and open access to law websites with a convenient editing back office interface that provides a set of custom- developed features that enable efficient upload and management of legal information.
- 16. LII-in-a-Box Law is hierarchical and time-sensitive, so LII-in-a-Box accounts for • The arrangement of legal documents within national and international hierarchies; • The deletion, amendment and related temporal representation of legal documents within a national hierarchy, e.g. through the availability of current and historical versions of legislation; • The interconnection between sources of legal norms, cases, legislation, etc., and the practical implementation through cross-linking; • Referring to legal information in a standard way to ensure ease of re-use within documents of all kinds, but most importantly in other legal documents; • Retrieving legal information using fielded and full text searches.
- 17. LII-in-a-Box - System design 1. It must contain defined content types - judgment, consolidated legislation, sessional laws, parliamentary debates, bills, government gazette, journal, etc.- which are common across countries and legal systems, albeit subject to localized customizations; 2. It must allow for content negotiation, i.e. to facilitate the output of legal information in a wide range of formats; 3. The content must be captured using a metadata model, incorporating current recognized standards, all with the aim of enabling advanced version control and output of descriptive metadata; 4. It will employ a PRESTO architecture, which we currently strive to implement, and which is a combined use of Permanent URIs, Representational State Transfer (REST), and object-oriented design and modelling 5. It is mobile-ready.
- 18. LII-in-a-Box: Information Retrieval • Browsability • Search (user-centric, but for both old- fashioned and experienced users) oGoogle-like oMetadata advanced search oTaxonomies for indexes oMulti-site (federated?) search • Data re-use (Functional Spec: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xZ71uNyBHUAD3ip5npgK6Yd5TrawVr8SpYkKoR9MYlA/ edit?usp=sharing )
- 19. Off-line Dissemination: Freedom Toaster for Law
- 20. Off-line Dissemination: Pocket Law