Open Data

Open data is the idea that some data should be freely available to everyone to use and republish as they wish, without restrictions from copyright, patents or other mechanisms of control [1]. In OPENLEGALDATA.IO, we consume and provide open data.

We collect, annotate, and enrich legal documents from trustworthy sources. Together with domain experts, we aim to create a high-quality annotated and interlinked dataset with rich metadata fields for German legal documents that we publish as (linked) open data. Moreover, we develop an open processing pipeline to enable researchers and journalists to directly work on our data and to publish their results.

We currently work on linking entities to open knowledge graphs such as Wikidata or YAGO. This additional knowledge can be presented as background information, for example, to help understand the legal argumentation behind a certain jurisdictional decision.

Figure 1: The OPENLEGALDATA.IO approach: Harvesting legal documents from official sources, extracting information from the raw documents and enriching the documents with data from additional sources. The platform content accessible through an API to facilitate analysis and retrieval tasks.

1. Auer, S. R.; Bizer, C.; Kobilarov, G.; Lehmann, J.; Cyganiak, R.; Ives, Z. (2007). “DBpedia: A Nucleus for a Web of Open Data”. The Semantic Web. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. 4825. p. 722.