Open Laws Foundation

AKN4OLF: the profile

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The core principle

We normalize metadata, not content.

Legal content is not normalizable across jurisdictions, and trying to do it is how this kind of project dies. An Italian comma, a U.S. section, and a French article are not three names for the same object: they differ in granularity, hierarchy, and citation rules. Force them into one schema and you either lose everything that makes each jurisdiction useful (lowest common denominator) or build an unmaintainable monster with a field for every national exception (highest common multiple).

Archive: the canonical corpus

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Generated, not curated

The archive is the project’s output, not its source of truth. Every document in it came out of the pipeline, built from an official source, validated against the conformance suite, and reproducible from that source.

Contributors

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

This page is generated, not hand-curated. Founders aside, everyone here earned their place with commits to the foundation’s own repositories, and the list ignores nothing and no one: if you have a merged contribution and you’re missing, it’s a bug, not a snub.

Diff: semantic and type-aware

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Why a normal diff isn’t enough

Run diff on two versions of an act and you get added and removed lines. A lawyer, a journalist, or a downstream system does not care that line 412 moved. They care what kind of change it was. Did the substantive text of an article change? Did the entry into force shift? Or was it just a typo fix, a renumbering, a formatting cleanup?

Pipeline: adapters and ingest

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

What the pipeline does

We don’t invent a corpus. We build the machinery that lets anyone take their own jurisdiction’s already-published legal data and turn it into a common, verifiable, interoperable form, then keep it that way as the law changes.

Principles

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

1. Normalize metadata, never content

This is the rule everything else follows from. Legal content does not normalize across jurisdictions, and the projects that try to force it either collapse into a useless lowest common denominator or balloon into an unmaintainable schema with a field for every national exception.