Joyce the soothsayer

From an illustrated Finnegans Wake. c.f. irish debt and Bank of Ireland's amazing assessment from 2007.

Harvard bound

I plan to attend The Future of Law Libraries: The Future Is Now? at Harvard in June. Looking forward to participating, especially with respect to primary legal materials.

I see Carl will be talking about the Twelve Tables...I used those as a springboard for my talk on authenticity of legal materials at AALL 2009.

Under the hood of KLISS - a technical white paper

KLISS is built on top of the LWB platform. This white paper talks about how LWB, at a technical level, addresses the many challenges of legislative IT and the intricacies of legislatures/parliaments.

KLISS is alive and so am I

Well, I have been offline since XMas as a result of KLISS roll-out but I'm finally coming up for air.

For a whole bunch of very good reasons late last year, we added an internet facing front end to the KLISS system launch this year (in time for the 2011-12 legislative session).

KLISS phase 1 was mostly about the complex back-office functions of the legislature. In particular, replacing a very labor intensive, paper based bill processing system that involved scissors and colored pencils and glue sticks. (See the "flagged bill" in this short video).

Although adding a front-end to all of the new back-end machinery (circa 130 virtual machines of integrated back-office functions) added significantly to Propylon's coffee intake, we have made it through a very challenging timescale. The KLISS Internet-facing website is http://kslegislature.org.

We still have a lot of work to do to expose the power of the back-office systems on the website. The KLISS website truly is just the foyer into the vast factory complex where the real legislative content work takes place. It is in that behind-the-scenes factory that most of KLISS lives.

Over the next while I hope to blog more about how it all works under the hood and about plans for the future of KLISS. Now that we have the critical eDemocracy back-office platform in place, the sky is the limit on what we can do in information provision and services to legislators and the public.

I am very much looking forward to being a part of that.

Palfrey on open legislation

"This new legal information architecture must be grounded in a reconceptualization of the public sector’s role and draw in private parties, such as Google, Amazon, Westlaw, and LexisNexis, as key intermediaries to legal information." A new legal information environment for the future.

MicroXML

Yay! I hope this initiative flies. It is long overdue and continues in that that long and largely-successful pattern of evolving standards by *taking stuff out*.
Remember Antoine de St-Expurey who said (in Wind, Sand and Stars):

"A designer knows s/he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."

Towards mashups based on timelines

Dan Jellinek writes about a very important point Open Data 'Must Add Context'. Context is absolutely king when it comes to interpreting public records which is why KLISS works the way it works.

Lawrence Lessig has also written about the problem of context in his Against Transparency.

We will soon, I hope, get passed the problem of data access. OGD, data.gov, law.gov, legislation.co.uk etc. will see to that.

Then we can move onto addressing the context problem. To do that, we will need to address what is, to my mind, the key missing piece of the Web today: the time dimension of information.

It does not have to be complicated. I would suggest we start with some simple "social contracts" for URI's that contain temporal information. Tim Berners Lee's Cool URI's don't change has been around for many years now and contains what is to my mind the key idea: encoding dates in URIs. e.g. this URI signals the time dimension in its elements: http://www.w3.org/1998/12/01/chairs.

The notion of URIs having structure has been a wee bit controversial (See Axioms but I think its a fine idea :-) Jon Udel is worth reading on this point too.

So, where could a few simple agreements about temporal URI patterns get us?

In two words *timeline mashups*. Today, the majority of mashups are essentially data joins using location as the join point. Imagine a Web in which we can create similar dynamic data expositions but based on time lines. That is the prize we will win if we can get agreements on encoding the temporal dimension of information.

Imagine a world in which we can automatically generate beautiful information displays like this, or this that mashup data from many disparate, independent sources?

Would it be worth the effort? In my opinion, absolutely! It would be a great place to start, yielding huge value for a relatively small effort.

Higher up the effort scale but still very worthwhile would be mechanisms for querying w.r.t. time e.g. Memento and Temporal RDF.

How wonderful would it be if we could then create temporal mashups of temporal mashups? How wonderful would it be if we could create a temporal dimension *on top* of a geo-spatial dimension to create spatial-and-temporal mashups?

As Don Heiman, CITO for the Kansas State Legislature and the visionary behind KLISS likes to say: "be still my heart"...