The Universal Pantograph Representation is the essence of networking

With the advent of “free law”, more sophisticated legal content has become available online, some of it with a RESTful interface. Case law, statutes, regulations, et cetera, are natural candidates for a topic map, so I whipped up a quick plug-in as a proof of concept. It has the usual features of this implementation: The user only needs to enter data in a format already familiar to them (in this case “158 F.3d 674”), mark the data up as a player of a particular type, and the appropriate content (here, a link to the text of the cited case and information about the case in a floating box) is automatically created, along with an auto-generated TOC and individual pages for any associations, association types, roles, players, and castings not already created. (Note that the collocation objective is ever present: All instances of the subject represented by “158 F.3d 674” will appear on the same page, with the usual CMS features of commenting and so forth.)

Of course, legal citation isn’t really something to be “whipped up,” but given a level of effort on pattern recognition on the content side it’s very easy to deliver content available via REST or web services in context via Drupal. And the fact that the data is out there, in clean XML, will make determining what the patterns even are so much more easy.