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vog

I find it amusing that here in Germany, we have that for years:

http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/

All laws are available in XML, HTML, PDF, etc. The site also provides an RSS feed.

In addition, some enthusiasts regularily download stuff from there and apply those to a Git repository:

https://github.com/bundestag/gesetze

That way, this repository contains not only the current laws, but also the history of how the laws developed!

For the Git repository, the XML version is not used directly, but converted to markdown. This produces very readable diffs:

https://github.com/bundestag/gesetze/commit/f90e8fc8eb20f081...

Wouldn't it be cool if we could finally manage our laws of filing pull requests?

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Likewise in the UK:

http://www.legislation.gov.uk/developer/formats/

XML, HTML, RDF/XML for everything, as well as browsable online (often with original source PDFs of the printed laws), with both online and RDF/XML representations showing all alterations to the law (with date, cross-reference to the Act that made the amendment, etc.).

The website is one of the big success stories of RDF, IMO, as it is all based around a model of the laws in RDF, with everything else just being varying serializations thereof. It also allows the website to show what has been amended — no need for dumping stuff to GitHub and then diffing it! (e.g., see the annotation on 28(1)c in http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1998/29/part/IV)

That all said, there tends to be a delay between the PDF being uploaded and everything being marked up and entered into the RDF database (see the "new legislation" on the home page).

I actually wrote a tumblr post about that a while ago. It also included a user engagement aspect that would allow users to subscribe to topics of interest to receive a curated feed of changes that could each have a dialogue/poll emerge. I hadn't really thought through the specifics but its awesome to know that something like this is already started to some degree. Thanks for that!

Here's the post if interested.

http://proggr.tumblr.com/post/52801512630/githubberment

In France, all is on the Web, but you’re not allowed to crawl it unless you pay :/

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