Canonical Legal and Legislative Uniform Resource Locators and Identifiers

Open Government Community Group,




Greetings.  I would like to describe canonical legal and legislative uniform resource locators (URL), identifiers (URI) and hashtags.




Joe Carmel, a former Chief of the Legislative Computer Systems at the U.S. House of Representatives, broached the topic in 2010: 




http://blog.law.cornell.edu/voxpop/2010/07/15/legislinkorg-simplified-human-readable-urls-for-legislative-citations/ and provided hyperlinks to resources including:





http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-spinosa-urn-lex-01



http://citability.org/



http://www.legislink.org/






http://thomas.loc.gov/home/handles/help.html







Legal blogging would be enhanced by such canonical URL’s.  With regard to legal blogs (blawgs), “the ranks of lawyer bloggers now include prominent judges, numerous law professors, nationally-recognized appellate lawyers and entire practice groups” (http://www.americanbar.org/groups/departments_offices/legal_technology_resources/resources/articles/youraba0808.html) (http://www.abajournal.com/blawgs/, http://www.loc.gov/law/find/web-archive/legal-blawgs.php).







Such canonical URL’s would convenience law schools, legal textbooks, and legal research.




Such canonical URL's would convenience encyclopedia users: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Law_citation_templates .





Pertinent topics include legal citation, analysis and bibliometrics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_citation, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_research_in_the_United_States#Citing_to_Legal_Documents, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citation_analysis, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibliometrics).




Multimedia content could be cited utilizing media fragment URI's (http://www.w3.org/TR/media-frags/), for instance C-SPAN content, and videos could utilize transcript and/or chapter video tracks for structure and nested structured to facilitate software-based selections of video clips at the granularity of sections, paragraphs and sentences of speech.




Pingback (http://www.hixie.ch/specs/pingback/pingback) can provide website users with features including navigation based upon what links to or cites content, documents, multimedia and to portions of documents and multimedia, including with typed hyperlinks.  


Websites can provide RSS feeds and saved searches, URL, email notifications and RSS feeds, including for searches about what links to or cites to content.  With pingback-based features, configurable at the convenience of bloggers linking to content, websites can facilitate enhanced navigation, content discovery of blogs and distributed blog-based forums for users.










Kind regards,




Adam Sobieski