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Acts of Words
by David Friggens
http://liby-travis.liby.waikato.ac.nz/cgi-bin/nzacts.pl
Most New Zealanders are like me, I'm guessing, and have never seriously considered specifically the large body of laws that govern us. After all, what could be more boring that a huge corpus of dry text? "Acts of Words" is a site for exploring legislation, specifically NZ Acts of Parliament. You can search, sort and filter the list to find different Acts, and find out information about the words they contain - how many there are, how "readable" the document is, and what the common words and phrases are. Through word clouds and some minor statistics to just exploring the list of names and stumbling across surprises, the site gives a better appreciation of the laws of our land and opens some questions that hopefully interest people into exploring more.
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Definer
by Mohammad Abdullatif
http://www.definer.org.nz
Definer won the Mix and Mash 2011 Open Government category sponsored by Parliamentary Counsel Office.
Definer is a dictionary of all terms defined in the New Zealand Acts of Parliament. Definer provides three services on top of the dictionary. The law in New Zealand impacts our life deeply. We interact with it and discuss it regularly, yet there is no dictionary available online which lists the meanings of the terms defined in the law. If I am arguing with a friend over the legal meaning of a term, it is hard to come to an agreement or find an answer quickly. That is where Definer comes in! Definer is a dictionary of all terms defined in the New Zealand Acts available online on the NZ Legislation website. Definer provides three services: 1. Term Index: All terms defined in the Acts are presented using an alphabetical index. The terms have been extracted from the Acts and only their definitions are shown. 2. Smart Search: Some terms are defined across multiple Acts and therefore have multiple definitions. Definer allows searching through the terms and presents all definitions of the term along with the act name, part and section in which the term was defined to show the context of the definition. 3. Cloud Timeline The timeline presents a tag cloud of the most frequent terms in their Acts by decade starting from the year 1900. This is to show the different themes present in the law across the different decades. Each tag in the cloud represents a term and can be clicked on to view its definition(s). Benefits of Definer: - Allows finding legal meanings of terms quickly across all Acts with an easy to use interface that shows only the definition of a term and not the whole section where the term is defined - Provides an alphabetical index of all terms defined in the Acts of Parliament that are available online - Shows the different themes present in the law per decade since 1900 - Available publicly and is free of charge I hope students, journalists, lawyers and everyone else finds it useful!
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Lawhub: New Zealand Legislation Visualised
by Rowan Crawford
http://lawhub.org.nz
Lawhub is git -- a version control system -- for legislation. It parses the xml documents of legislation provided at http://legislation.govt.nz/subscribe and examines them for differences between the versions. It's cool because it lets you get at the meat of what's changed between the iterations of law. You can search for particular words within the term of a government. Words which are popular within a term are extracted and ranked; the acts which have had the largest weight of text are displayed. It also tries -- emphasis on the "tries" -- to match a Te Ara article with the term of the government being examined. In conclusion, lawhub lets you see how a government has spent its time. And that's awesome!
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Search and Visualize Key Topics in the New Zealand Legislation
by Nathan Holmberg, Alyona Medelyan
http://www.nzlawsearch.com/
The main data set used for this Mashup consists over 2,700 Acts available via the NZ Legislation http://www.legislation.govt.nz/. Unlike many other data sets, legislation documents are primarily chunks of text, i.e. unstructured data that is difficult to visualize. Common visualizations of such data are stream graphs or tag clouds, which require automated tag assignment. The caveats here are inaccuracy (e.g. splitting text into words should avoid tags like “zealand”) and inconsistency (“immigrant” and “immigration” should appear as one tag). We solved these issues using the linguistic API by a NZ company Pingar (the company Alyona works for). It is available free for research purposes and prototype systems. To achieve consistency we used the UK Public Sector Vocabulary IPSV, which we have manually converted into a NZ version (NZPSV). Metadata assignment with NZPSV is now available via Pingar’s Taxonomy Matching service to everybody (http://www.pingar.com/DevelopersEE.aspx). Each NZ Act and corresponding auto-detected topics were indexed using the open-source search engine Solr, which allows searching inside this data and refining of results by facets. Is it an improvement to the original search on Legislation.govt.nz (the preview)? We think so. Instead of a plain list of matching titles, our Mashup allows users to navigate the NZ Law with as much fun as they experience refining search results on sites like Trademe. The application is thought through, but do expect qualitative improvements after October 3rd: A great chunk of the competition time we spent in the desert of Nevada on holidays… We are also waiting for the final release of legislation.govt.nz to ensure that we can link documents to the correct location on their original site. We believe that our MashUp is useful for research purposes as it allows one to retrospectively understand how the NZ legislation has been crafted, what topics were trending in particular decades and which areas have received most attention. It is also educational for adults as well as for kids. Multiple colourful visualizations catch people’s attention and encourage learning more about the NZ law.
