McGrath's 142857'th Law

The 142857th law states that the number of laws with the same overall shape as Moore's Law doubles every 18 months.

The myth of non-repudiation

Excellent piece by John Gregory on the very thorny non-repudiation question.

Give every fact a home page

Jon Udell says "lets give every fact its own home page on the web.

Absolutely. Numeric quantities, in particular, need this. The web needs to get a lot better at slinging numbers - not pages - and update events around the place.

Its starting to happen. Mostly, I think because of the emerging "web of things". Things like cosm and things like Personal Event Networks need "facts" to work with and a goodly number of said facts are numeric quantities.

Now it can coherently be argued that RDF makes numerical facts just drop out of its grander epistemological theory but I worry that RDF is seen as overkill for situations where it really is just a number you are looking for.

If the URI is http://facts.com/populations/ireland. All I want to do is to a HTTP GET and get back 4487000.

The simple case should be simple.

NCSL conference in Chicago, August 7-9

It is NCSL time of year again. Its hard to believe a year has gone by since the last annual NCSL event in San Antonio, Texas.

This year its Chicago. I hope its cooler than Texas was....Probably not.

We will be exhibiting @ booth 813, talking about eDemocracy, eLegislation, 21st century law-making, Legislative Transformation.

If you are going, please stop by and say hi.

MicroXML

Today's MicroXML brings back memories of
sml-dev and Common XML. Hopefully, MicroXML will succeed where these two efforts I was involved in, did not.

Ohio State Legislature

We are now working with the Ohio State Legislature on an LWB implementation. Similar in scope to the Kansas State Legislature's KLISS system that was the backdrop to the series of posts titled What is a Legislature?

The Ohio system has a very strong focus on machine readable data formats and Web feeds which is a very exciting aspect of the project.

Authenticity and the Law

I find myself disagreeing with Sunlight Foundation. Worrying about authenticity is not a "red herring". It is profoundly important and critical if we are to move to paperless legislative processes and "born digital" law corpora.

It really is not all that complicated once you take a pragmatic approach to it. Sadly, there is much confusion and mis-information around digital signatures and crypto and the very meaning of the term "authenticity"...

There is no technological silver bullet here. What Congress needs is a Legislative Enterprise Architecture that is designed from the get-go to enable authentication not just of XML but of all promulgated artifacts. Doing that has a lot more to do with provenance than anything else and provenance is something you embed at the heart of your Legislative Enterprise Architecture.