Legal RDF.org

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Project List

This section describes five project areas that are important to the goals of the Legal RDF organization.

Organizational Tasks

Incorporate Legal RDF. A charter and a Board of Directors for the organization is required. Of note, the license for all material developed by Hypergrove Engineering requires that the Creative Commons license found here is to be used by the Legal RDF organization.
Contract with project staff. During 2006, several contracts are envisioned, subject to approval of the Board of Directors. (1) a 6-month full-time equivalent (FTE) contract with a director who will provide oversight of all organization activities, and resource development support; (2) a 1-month FTE contract with a Semantic Web specialist, who will perform an independent analysis of the ontology; (3) a 4-month FTE contract with a software developer, responsible for site administrator and applications installation and modification; and (4) a 3-month FTE contract with a translator for delivering the ontology in both Spanish and French.
Manage corporate accounts and reports to membership. Quarterly and year-end accounting tasks are necessary; a certified public accountant will be hired. Progress reports to membership need to be written and distributed.

Sponsorship Outreach

Directly market to Washington State law firms and governments. The primary sponsorship goal is a majority of the top 50 law firms in Washington State, plus membership by the State of Washington and other jurisdictions. For law firms primarily located out-of-state, structured descriptions of uniform portions of the Washington State code, plus the United States code, will be emphasized.
Alert regional and national news outlets. There is significant newsworthiness in the fact that the Legal RDF organization is creating material intended to jump-start the adoption of "reasoning tools" from the Semantic Web community.
Field automated membership website software. Secondary sponsorship goals include a significant presence by companies associated with the Semantic Web community; by companies now providing (document management) software products to legal firms; by individuals associated with law schools; and by other state governments and the federal government.
Address regional and national legal and technical groups. Over time, outreach includes raising awareness of the organization's goals and products among other organizations in the legal industry (e.g., paralegals); at industry conferences and trade shows; and at Semantic Web -related conferences.

Resource Services

Configure/modify software for XHTML-format resource requests. For each resource in Legal RDF's library, one can retrieve its formatted text narrative, organized using the fifteen Dublin Core categories for library resources. These narratives are normally retrieved by users at either of the Legal RDF websites.
Install/modify software for RDF-format resource requests. For each resource in Legal RDF's library, one can retrieve its structured RDF description. This structured markup is normally retrieved by software applications (that is, by "reasoning tools") executing on law firm computers.
Install/specialize software for resource WIKIs. Each library resource -- including those within the Legal RDF ontology -- needs to have a convenient editing facility by which domain-specific experts (e.g., intellectual property attorneys) can provide input to the textual or structured description of the resource. The textual description will be provided by a WIKI facility (example: Wikipedia). This facility will be modified to allow structured markup to be entered as a separate blob from text description.

Resource Databases

Refine/finalize the Legal RDF ontology. The catalog of NAFTA's NAICS-related classifications needs to be completed, plus its NAIPS product classifications are to be entered as they are available. Mapping of the ontology to the Universal Business Language is likely desirable.
Establish baseline resources for all targeted legal codes. The initial step in providing a structured markup description of a statute, is to establish a resource for the statute that can be referenced by the markup description and by markup of references to the statute. The Legal RDF community needs to identify the set of legal codes for which resources are to be immediately created.
Provide structured descriptions of legal codes. Statutes (and regulations and contract terms) specify at least three kinds of information: (1) specific things that are declared to exist (e.g., a county, a commission, a department); (2) types of things that are said can exist (e.g., roles, crimes, remedies); and (3) statements of facts about either specific things, or types of things. For each statute, instances of these three kinds of information are identified and then represented using the terms in the Legal-RDF ontology.
Maintain ontology and other resources as required. Recommendations from members; from ontology specialists; from software developers; and from the W3C (e.g., the Semantic Web Best Practices' Technical Notes) need to be incorporated into the ontology on a regular basis.

Technical Material

Provide Technical Guidelines. Recommendations are to be published about the use of various W3C XML dialects when encoding legal documents, including HTML, XHTML, XForms, and SVG.
Create Technical Modules. For purposes of document and text-entry validation, an XHTML 1.1 -conforming module for XHTML 2.0 documents will be created. Further, XSL stylesheets need to be published for transformations between various representations (e.g., beween "normalized" and "presentation" forms); for formatting XHTML and RDF resource request responses for display to end-users; and other uses as requested by membership.
Publish sample legal documents. Public domain legal documents will be marked up using the Legal RDF ontology to exemplify its use in commercial and other software applications.
Install RSS and maintain news content. RSS newscasts are an effective means of communicating updates to the two websites operated by the organization; of alerting the membership to relevant breaking news; and other announcements such as technical conferences.

Minimum Operating Budget

	Budget	Comments
Organization Expenses
Legal Fees	$ 5,000	Potentially donated in kind
Accounting Fees	3,000	Quarterly and annual returns
Board of Directors	3,000	Quarterly meeting expenses
Memberships	6,350	Non-profit 3-year W3C membership cost
Web Administrator	15,000	(out-sourced) ISP services
Staff Expenses
Director	55,000	6-month full-time equivalent
Ontologist	10,000	1-month FTE, to review ontology
Java Programmer	28,000	4-month FTE, modify open-source software
XSL Programmer	35,000	5-month FTE, develop sponsor software
Linguist	15,000	3-month FTE, to translate ontology
Other Expenses
Office Expenses	500	Printer supplies, letterhead, etc.
Computer Hardware	3,000	Potentially donated in kind
Computer Software	1,000	Software development tools
Forecasted Total, 2006	$ 169,850
Contingencies	30,150	Education Partnership Fund
Total Budget, 2006	$ 200,000

Aggressive Operating Budget

	Budget	Comments
Organization Expenses
Legal Fees	$ 5,000	Potentially donated in kind
Accounting Fees	3,000	Quarterly and annual returns
Board of Directors	20,000	Quarterly meeting expenses
Memberships	6,350	Non-profit 3-year W3C membership cost
Web Administrator	15,000	(out-sourced) ISP services
Staff Expenses
Director	65,000	7-month full-time equivalent
Ontologist	60,000	6-month FTE, to assist with ontology
Java Programmer	56,000	8-month FTE, to install/modify site software
XSL Programmer	25,000	4-month FTE, to create sponsor software
RDF Programmer	35,000	5-month FTE, to create sponsor resources
Technical Writer	16,000	4-month FTE, to assist with ontology
Linguist	45,000	9-month FTE, to translate to 3 languages
Other Expenses
Travel Expenses	10,000	Establish conference presence
Office Expenses	500	Printer supplies, letterhead, etc
Computer Hardware	3,000	Potentially donated in kind
Computer Software	1,000	Software development tools
Forecasted Total, 2006	$ 365,850
Contingencies	44,150	Education Partnership Fund
Total Budget, 2006	$ 400,000