LinkedLegislation Blog

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]

To convert CA statutes from text to html, I used the txt2html module, written in Perl by Kathryn Anderson. This was step 1 in the 5-step process I used to reintroduce metadata to the statutes.While there are a number of free online text to html converters, and some commercial packages... [Read More]

How to convert legislation from plain text to structured html? For those more interested in results than process, you're in luck. This post focuses primarily on the results of the transformation. I am working here with California's statutes, published in plain text on the legislature's website. There are many layers... [Read More]

In a previous post, I mentioned some of the challenges in recovering meaningful structural information (titles, paragraphs) from pdfs, and why government entities should retain this information when they publish electronic documents.I'll have more to say in future posts about what information is important to retain, which, at a minimum, should include document structure (titles, sections,... [Read More]