Aug
18, 2010-08-23
Source :
http://egovau.blogspot.com/2010/08/uk-redevelops-legislative-database-to.html
A good idea also for EUR-Lex at EU
level
Brought to my attention by Mia
Garlick via Twitter, the UK has redeveloped its legislative database with a
focus on reuse by external parties.
The recently released site legislation.gov.uk
covers 800 years of legislation from England, Scotland, Wales and Northern
Ireland.
According to an article from Cornell University Law School, Legislation.gov.uk,
John Sheridan, Head of e-Services and Strategy at The National Archives says
that the site was designed to meet two objectives,
to deliver a high quality public
service for people who need to consult, cite, and use legislation on the Web;
and to expose the UK’s Statute Book as data, for people to take, use, and
re-use for whatever purpose or application they wish.
The Crown Copyright for the site
specifies that,
You are encouraged to use and re-use
the information that is available on this site freely and flexibly, with only a
few conditions.
This type of approach makes legislation vastly more accessible to the public
and, through an API provided by the site, supports the development of
applications and services that assist the public, organisations and lawyers to
understand and apply the law.
More information on why and how the site was designed is available in the
article referenced above.
Australia isn't yet at the same point. Our legislation, detailed at Comlaw, is not yet supported through APIs
or other machine-readable data formats and is covered under a more restrictive
licensing regime,
This work is copyright. You may
download, display, print and reproduce this material in unaltered form only
(retaining this notice) for your personal, non-commercial use or use within
your organisation. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act
1968, all other rights are reserved.
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