de-law-explorer

An experimental tool to assist working on law codes. For demonstratioinal purposes, it works on federal law of Germany.

Notable features include:

• Overall improved representation of text.
• High precision wiki-linking between books and codes.
• Inline code inspection.
• Context visualization.
• High precision bidirectional references.
• Work stack.

This tool served as prototype to evaluate efficiency increases on lawyers' work.

Impressions

Code viewer:

Neighbours for SGB 3:

Relation between SGB 3 and HwO:

Disclaimer

• This is a purely experimental tool, serving demonstrational purposes only.
• This project is no longer under active development, and has not been after 2015. Feature may be incomplete or crash.
• The UI is mostly German due to its initial target audience.
• It has not been reviewed for security issues. Neither this code nor any of its last dependencies. Use at your own risk!
• We do not accept pull-requests, treat issues, ship releases or do any kind of support. Feel free to fork this repository on your own behalf.
• Do not use this tool for production, it contains known flaws (see below)
• We do not share this as a service subject to German code of law services (Rechtsdienstleistungsgesetz).
• This project's build dependencies (not included) might or might not be compatible to GPL v3.
• The build chain of this project might or might not generate license compliant outputs with respect to dependencies. Be aware in case of distribution.

Setup

Grab Qt SDK v5.4 (newer versions not supported for webview/webwidgets/... incompatiblity). You need a C++ compiler with 2014 versions of GNU or clang being known to work.

You need these additional dependencies:

• FreeType2 v2.5.3
• Glew
• GLM
• jQuery v1.11
• 7z

Put these dependencies to the locations according to de_law_explorer.pro project file. Let Qt Creator build the project for you.

We have tested successful builds on Windows, Mac and Linux, given a OpenGL v2.1 compatible GPU.

For doing a complete setup, look at parser/README.md.

Flaws and limitations

Parsing laws is non-trivial. Especially on the lack on non-semantic schema or formats. We have tested parsing German federal law, and estimate the accuracy of trivial content (non-trivial contentent is images for not being supported and unknown copyrights, tables for mostly being irregular, technical descriptions, schemas, ...) up to 90%.

The missing 10% make the tool worthless for silently swallowing or messing up things. We estimate a demand for human curating for finding and fixing such issues under constant updates of new laws.

Authors

Marcel Heing-Becker, Timo Rademann

License

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, version 3 of the License.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See LICENSE for more details.