Legally Linked: Linked Open Data Principles Applied To Code Of Federal Regulations
The Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School is about making law accessible and understandable, for free. It’s been engaged in that mission since the early ’90s, and semantic web technology today plays a role in furthering that goal.
The organization this month published a new electronic edition of the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR), which contains a bevy of rules across 50 titles that impact nearly all areas of American business. Work underway at LII, dubbed the Linked Legal Data project, seeks to apply Linked Open Data principles enhances access to the CFR, with capabilities such as being able to search its Title 21 Food and Drugs database using brand names for drugs (such as Tylenol), and receiving the generic name for the drug (acetaminophen) as a suggested term. “You cannot look for regulatory information on Tylenol in the CFR because Tylenol will never be there,” says Dr. Núria Casellas, who is a visiting scholar at the LII spearheading work on the project. “That is a brand name. What you actually want to look for are components, such as acetaminophen.”
While the general citizenry might find reasons to leverage the fruits of this effort, businesses that must comply with these requirements are a more likely target – not just the lawyers and paralegals, but those responsible for tasks, for example, such as storing and caring for products their company exports or imports, including understanding the safety regulations that apply to it. The Tylenol-acetaminophen example, she says, is very interesting because it showcases how using the wrong word or the incorrect approach can hamper a company from being able to find the relevant regulatory or safety information it needs to take into consideration.

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Back in March, The Semantic Web Blog wrote
Nature Publishing Group has joined the linked open data community.
Eileen Brown recently reported
Metaome, which was founded by CEO Kalpana Krishnaswami and CTO Ramkumar Nandakumar as a bioinformatics services provider before transitioning to a product vendor, contains a few more than a dozen life sciences public data sets so far. Infomaticians in the life sciences space have the expertise to query such data across sets via SPARQL, but the front-line biologist isn’t necessarily an infomatician. So, DistilBio has created a query interface that makes it easier for them to ask large and complex questions in a simplified way across data sets while building a graph in the process.
Last week the New York City Council gave its nod of approval to legislation that would require city agencies to publish public data sets in a common format on an online portal for the public’s use. Mayor Bloomberg just signed off on it, with the Open Data Bill legislation to be phased in over six years.
Semantic Web Community: I’m disappointed in us! Or at least in our group marketing prowess. We have been failing to capitalize on two major trends that everyone has been talking about and that are directly addressable by Semantic Web technologies! For shame.
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