RE: Schemas for Opinions of Federal Courts

Stuart, Let’s do it.  Should we talk offline?

 

Sam Deskin

OpenJurist.org

 

From: Stuart Robinson [mailto:stuartro@google.com] 
Sent: Saturday, August 15, 2015 5:41 PM
To: Sam Deskin
Cc: Thad Guidry; schema.org Mailing List
Subject: Re: Schemas for Opinions of Federal Courts

 

Personally, I think developing some shared core schema for this domain would make a lot of sense. I think the problem is that the domain is complicated and coming up with something general purpose that applies across countries and their respective legal systems is difficult. But we should give it a go. If it proves just too difficult to model across legal systems, we can come up with schema specific to a single legal system. For example, you might have USLegalDecision instead of LegalDecision.


On Saturday, August 15, 2015, Sam Deskin <sam@openjurist.org> wrote:

I think http://OpenJurist.org  is the epitome of a long tail search website.

 

I wonder what the group thinks they would do for something that is as specialized as legal opinions; what would you do if this was your website, would you create an extension for legal opinions? OR would you use an existing schema? Which one? Thad already suggested Assess and React Action.

 

If so, and you wanted it to be widely used, what do you think of these Properties?

 

Court

Plaintiff-Appellant

Third-Party Plaintiff-Appellant 

Defendant-Appellee 

Third Part Defendant-Appellee

Citation(s)

Docket Number

Date Argued

Date Decided

Attorneys for Plaintiff-Appellant

Attorneys for Third-Party Plaintiff-Appellant 

Attorneys for Defendant-Appellee 

Attorneys for Third Part Defendant-Appellee

Judge/Justice Hearing Matter

Judge/Justice Delivering Opinion

Holding

Area of Law

Country of Jurisdiction

Region of Jurisdiction

Company(ies) Mentioned

Individual(s) Mentioned

Cases Cited 

Links to Cases Cited

Cases Citing

Links to Cases Citing

courtAppealedFrom

Citation of Prior Opinion

Link to Prior Opinion

 

I know that some might be less ambitious at first, but I am trying to be complete so that we don’t waste development resources on doing half of the work now and then have to do the other half again later.

 

Is there a way to make things better/more generic so that other countries legal opinions could fit in this extension better as well? Is there anything I have missed?

 

Sam Deskin

OpenJurist.org

 

From: Thad Guidry [mailto:thadguidry@gmail.com <javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','thadguidry@gmail.com');> ] 
Sent: Thursday, August 13, 2015 11:57 AM
To: Sam Deskin
Cc: schema.org Mailing List
Subject: Re: Schemas for Opinions of Federal Courts

 

On Thu, Aug 13, 2015 at 12:33 PM, Sam Deskin <sam@openjurist.org <javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','sam@openjurist.org');> > wrote:

Hi Thad,

I appreciate you taking the time to respond to me.  I see why you might suggest Assess and React Action, but I think that I would be shoehorning judicial opinions into them.

​Not at all, Actions are supposed to be fairly generic, and all stakeholders and current clients treat them this way.  "about" just becomes more important to give context to them..so make sure not to skip using that property...as well as "sameAs".

​

Creating a new extension might be the best option, but I am not sure that it would be of much benefit to search engines or the public.  I am ambivalent about creating a new extension if search engines will not have any interest in it because there is ONE or very few websites using it.

 

​Someone has to start the long tail domain discussions...and it is this very reason that the stakeholders say "if you build it...we will gather".  In fact, that mantra is automatic as long as your robots.txt allows anyone to gather your structured data.  Don't be a pessimist, is my advice and the stakeholders advice when we are talking about the long tail domains such as Law, Sub-sciences, Metalworking, Craftmaking, Water caves, or Amur leopards (only 20 around in the world).

​

 

 Is there a way to determine whether the search engines’ “somewhat interested” attitude toward a Law extension would translate into use in search results?

 

​See above answer: YES

​

 

 These are the Properties that I can envision:

Court

Plaintiff-Appellant

Third-Party Plaintiff-Appellant 

Defendant-Appellee 
Third Part Defendant-Appellee

Citation(s)

Docket Number

Date Argued

Date Decided

Attorneys for Plaintiff-Appellant

Attorneys for Third-Party Plaintiff-Appellant 

Attorneys for Defendant-Appellee 

Attorneys for Third Part Defendant-Appellee

Judge/Justice Hearing Matter
Judge/Justice Delivering Opinion

Holding

Area of Law

Country of Jurisdiction

Region of Jurisdiction

Company(ies) Mentioned

Individual(s) Mentioned

Cases Cited

Cases Citing

 

How do these sound to you? 

 

 

​Those sound fine...it is extensive however, and in places it might be too USA-centric...but that is ok for now, because this is your domain.  What we will probably do is 1st round on an extension, is pick the most important properties (

search filters

​)​

 useful to folks​ globally.  It can always be further extended later or modified later.

 

Thad

+ThadGuidry <https://www.google.com/+ThadGuidry> 

​