Dear all,
As we continue to work towards our shared goals, we would like to update the community on the latest developments in the Judicial Data Collaborative. Firstly, we are pleased to announce that we have welcomed a new organisation to our collaborative - Centre for Criminology, Criminal Justice & Victimology at the Rajiv Gandhi National University of Law, Punjab.
In recent months, we have created a platform for the Definitions project and started populating it. This will serve as a research wiki: providing an interconnected understanding of legal terms, demonstrating how judicial data is captured and publicly released, and unpacking variations in procedures across the justice system. We are pleased to announce that the JDC will host its inaugural cohort of Student Research Associates to drive this effort. In the coming months, we are excited to see the selected students work under the supervision of JDC-affiliated institutions to grow this resource.
Take a look at the wiki below and if you would like to contribute to this project – as an author, editor or advisory member – please write to – please write to smita@dakshindia.or
Driven by Civic Data Lab, we are working on building an interactive explorer for sources of judicial data. This explorer will consolidate multiple “sources” of judicial data within a single explorable database that is easy to navigate. We hope this can help reduce unnecessary discretionary calls and streamline researchers’ efforts to determine which sources to use, when and for what purpose.
To know more, here is a template that outlines how we plan to map each data source. Please share your thoughts on the schema and do let us know if you would like to join this effort.
We have also started work on developing ontologies for specific legal domains within the financial sector. Legal ontologies are the formal, explicit specification of a shared conceptualisation in the legal domain. Ontologies can improve the efficiency and accuracy of legal processes by -
automating legal reasoning and decision-making & enabling legal information retrieval,
legal document analysis and
legal knowledge management.
Our goal is to create a standardised set of concepts and relationships (in the form of knowledge graphs) that can be used to improve knowledge management and data integration in the Indian legal industry. To better understand the approach this group will take, you may refer to Constructing a Knowledge Graph from Indian Legal Domain Corpus; Jain et al (May 2022) or Named Entity Recognition in Indian court judgments; Kalamkar et al (Nov 2022) as well as SALI, a US-based effort to develop interoperable legal data standards.If you would like to work on this initiative, please get in touch with Joseph Pookkatt at joseph@apjlaw.com.
We will continue to grow the community and engage with more sectoral experts, judicial data users and students in developing common resources.
Please share this update with anyone you believe would be interested in joining these working groups and we look forward to your continued participation and support for this collaboration!
Regards
Leah