New version of LegalAtlas
We are now in the final stages of releasing the next version of LegalAtlas. That is, the programming work has been done, and technical documents are being polished.
LegalAtlas is a tool that allows simultaneous viewing of spatial plans (or any other kind of map) and the regulations that govern specific parts of the map.
It’s actually really cool to see semantic web technology come to life: it’s built on RDF/OWL and uses SPARQL queries. The maps are generated by (our in-house developed) GML 3.1 adapter to OpenJUMP, the texts are (of course) in MetaLex format.
We have plenty of other ideas to extend this nifty technology, such as porting the whole thing to the Eclipse SWT plugin framework, combining it with Vex (a Wysywig XML editor) to write MetaLex documents, and using an RDF datastore as backend (such as Sesame). Integrating this with ontology tools such as TopBraid Composer or Protege will result in a really powerful semantic web workbench for legislative drafters, legal knowledge engineers etc.
I can hardly wait…
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