Improving Access to Non-CFR Federal Regulations Using Linked Data Technology

This session will describe how Rutgers-Newark Law Library is creating an archive of regulations from military agencies within the Department of Defense.  The program will discuss the following aspects of the archive:
-PERL scripts used to download the original documents and scrape metadata from agency websites;
-How metadata for the archive is formatted and entered into the Sesame RDF triplestore;
-The use of SKOS to represent agency document classification systems and provide enhanced subject indexing for the archive;
-The design of the archive’s user interface using PHP and SPARQL;
Many Federal Agencies publish their documents exclusively on departmental websites.  These documents include many regulations, policies, manuals, and other publications with legal significance.   This system of web publishing creates barriers to effective information retrieval by funneling documents into many separate databases with no overarching organization scheme.  The focus of this session will be on using linked data technology to improve access to and discovery of legal information published by government agencies.

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