LinkedLegislation Blog

I found more than a thousand errors in the course of parsing the online version of California's legal codes. At first, I thought there might be something wrong with my parsing algorithms -- I had, indeed, gone through a number of rounds of bug-fixing. These repeated sections were carried over... [Read More]

CA legislation transformed (w. new website--check it out!) If you want to skip the more technical post below altogether, just go to calaw.tabulaw.com [archived]. It has no styling or search function yet, but compare the navigational flow to California's official legislative site: https://www.leginfo.ca.gov/calaw.html

Starting with the unstructured data in California's legislation, it takes many steps to add structure to a single Section. Or rather, to add back in the metadata that the Section's original drafters intended, to help a reader understand and navigate the law. The next step is to apply the transformations... [Read More]

Steps 3 and 4 in converting the California legal Codes to structured HTML involve identifying references within the text (e.g. "pursuant to Section 480" or "under Section 15000 of the Vehicles Code"). This presents two challenges: (1) identifying the correct Code (the high level subject matter of the law), and... [Read More]

How to find section headings in a text document and convert them to targets for hyperlinks? If you have ever had this burning question, you'll want to read on. Or you can take my word for it that it would have been better for this information to be included in... [Read More]