New interview with John Sheridan about Legislation.gov.uk, Good Law, and Open Legislative Data

A new interview with John Sheridan of The National Archives (UK) has been posted by Alex Howard at E Pluribus Unum : U.K. National Archives makes ‘good law’ online, builds upon open data as a platform .

The post discusses Sheridan’s Legislation.gov.uk open legislative system, the UK’s Good Law Initiative, and open legislative data.

Here are excerpts of the post:

[...] I’d first met Sheridan virtually, back in August 2010, when I talked with the head of e-services and strategy at the United Kingdom’s National Archives about how linked data was opening up eight hundred years of legal history. That month, the National Archives launched legislation.gov.uk to provide public access to more than eight centuries of the legal history in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Just over three years later, I stepped off the Tube at the St. James Park Station and walked over to meet him in person and learn how his aspirations for legislation.gov.uk had met up with reality.

Over a cup of tea, Sheridan caught me up on the progress that his team has made in digitizing documents and improving the laws of the land. There are now 2 million monthly unique visitors to legislation.gov.uk every month, with 500+ million page views annually. People really are reading Parliament’s output, he observed, and increasingly doing so on tablets and mobile devices. The amount of content flowing into the site is considerable: according to Sheridan, the United Kingdom is passing laws at an estimated rate of 100,000 words every month [...]

Notable improvements over the years include the ability to compare the original text of legislation versus the latest version [...] and view a timeline of changes using a slider for navigation, exploring any given moment in time. Sheridan was particularly proud of the site’s rendering of legislation in HTML, include human-readable permanent uniform resource locators (URLS) and the capacity to produce on-demand PDFs of a given document. [...]

More specifically, Sheridan highlighted a “good law” project, wherein the Office of the Parliamentary Counsel (OPC) of Britain is working to help develop plain language laws that are “necessary, clear, coherent, effective and accessible.” A notable component of this good law project is an effort to apply a tool used in online publishing, software development and advertising — A/B testing — to testing different versions of legislation for usability. [...]

For more details, please see the complete post.

Click here for earlier posts about the Good Law initiative.

HT @digiphile

Filed under: Applications, Interviews, Others' scholarly or sophisticated blogposts, Projects, Technology developments Tagged: #goodlaw, (John Sheridan, Alex Howard, E Pluribus Unum, Free access to law, Good Law, Good Law Initiative, Legal Linked Data, Legal plain language, Legal semantic web, Legislation.gov.uk, Linked Data and law, National Archives UK, Open legal data, Open legislative data, Plain legal language, Public access to legal information, Semantic Web and law



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