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X-Pubs keynote: Transforming Legislation Publishing

Monday, June 23, 2008 — posted by Sarah

Brief introduction from Noz Urbina and an overview of the conference from Julian Murfitt. Some X-Pubs housekeeping items, including a flight announcement...
"Should a presentation be boring and sleep deprivation set in, oxygen masks will drop from the ceiling. Please put on your own mask before assisting others."
Hehe.

On to the keynote...John Sheridan, Head of e-Services at the Office of Public Sector Information, National Archives. Eeek, slight problem with slides -- and the presenter just launches right in without them. I bet he's terrified right now, but he looks perfectly composed.

We have slides. "Transforming Legislation Publishing"

Publishing legislation seem dry, but in fact it's quite relevant to the people at large -- and ignorance of the law is no excuse. Legislation documents use XML under the covers. Have been publishing legislation online since 1996 and of course print for a long time before that.

Strengths of their service:
Much of the content they were republishing online had not been touched in 10 years or so. However, they had as many as 500,000 external links (that is, links from other web sites pointing to their content). Breaking links was out of the question because the number of links help their content's Google rankings.

Key performance indicator: two clicks. 80 percent of information should be available in two clicks:
  1. Google search button.
  2. Click link on first page of results.
Their audience is demanding. Challenges included:
Primary motivation to improve usability and accessibility of content. Existing HTML content didn't look contemporary.

Persistent linking, "web continuity", overall 60 percent of links to official information are broken. Their solution to "persist" the 500,000 existing links was to provide redirection behavior, so that every URL resolves either to live content or to the government's archive on the web.

XML is the key to solving these assorted issues.

Trying to "future-proof" their work, especially by providing a way to allow for changing web standards (HTML/web standard may change, but we can keep underlying XML).

Legislative documents are highly structured but also have variations over time. Very difficult to capture in a structure. "Parliament trumps your XML schema." You can't say, "Sorry, but that won't work in our schema, so you can't pass that legislation." Must find the balance between accommodating what's needed and "allowing everything."

They developed Crown XML:
The Crown XML Schema for Legislation provides a full and comprehensive encoding for all United Kingdom primary and secondary legislation. It has been written using the World Wide Web Consortium XML Schema language and is the Government's official and authoritative data standard for legislation. Once a piece of legislation has been enacted or made, it is stored using this Schema format. Schema compliant legislation is available in XML for onward supply to legal publishers and others.
They provide sample documents, which even so cover only about half the possibilities in the full schema.

Users have options for various views of the legislation.

Their work leads to the concept of the web as a platform. Not just providing for users to consume, but also to reuse, aggregate, and combine.

Mixing data...hey, cookie dough!

The government's response to Web 2.0 trends. Government should enable information so that citizens can use the information. Doing so will lead not only to better public services, but also to other services, both commercial and noncommercial.

Problems include culture, rights, licensing, intellectual property, and technology challenges. Information becomes infrastructure and potentially as important as roads and other physical infrastructure. Legislation is widely cited content, which becomes infrastructure for other things. Legislation needs to be addressable with fragment identifiers, so that people can cite specific sections or paragraph rather than an entire act.

Why couldn't lawyers add editorial value to legislation in a wiki-type format. Not a job for the state, but something that could be enabled or inhibited by how the legislation is published. Providing addressable content and using standards would allow for third parties to use the legislation as a starting point for additional work.

They provide Atom (RSS) feeds for new legislation.

Library of Congress is an example of a re-user of UK legislation. UK legislation of interest for comparison purposes. They have a "PDF thing going on." Really wanted access to PDF versions of the information. Subscribe to the Atom feed, and the PDF will pop up there as a link.

Expect reuse for very granular areas...discussion of specific industries or topics. (If mad cow disease were to reoccur, expect footpaths to be closer, and a map could show in real-time what's open and what's closed.)

Providing sufficient flexibility into structure without descending into tag soup.

First question: Is the raw XML available to the public?
Yikes. The presenter hesitates and is quite uncomfortable. Seemed like a harmless enough question but apparently not. The answer is that it's available by subscription -- that is, lawyers pay to get access to it. They must balance between their economics and subscription income. They would like to publish XML; seems to be the direction that public policy is going. But "don't want to spend taxpayers' money to subsidize Lexis-Nexis."

Second question: Would these policies extend to others, like the Department for Transport?
Again, this sounds harmless to me, but appears to be quite controversial. Information produced as a core public task ("which is nowhere defined clearly") is public.

Really, when will government policy help the questioner push his employer into using structure? Interesting. I don't think we'd get that question in the U.S., other than in the negative.

Conferences here are so civilized, with the opening session at 10 a.m. Ahhhhh. Tea and cookies, er, biscuits at the breaks. Luvely.

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