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unitedstates / glossary

A glossary for the United States.
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Idea: Bulk definition import from the law #23

Open adelevie opened 10 years ago

adelevie commented 10 years ago

Quite possibly already though of, but:

You could probably target definitions sections from statutes and regulations and add them in bulk to this repo.

konklone commented 10 years ago

Definitely, as a starting point. I'm pretty big on readability and accessibility though, not legal precision. So I imagine they'd need a lot of rewriting.

adelevie commented 10 years ago

Do you envision this repo containing multiple definitions/sources for a term?

From a legal research perspective (which I know is not priority #1 here) being able to find all/ many of the legally-significance definitions for the same term would be a big win.

On Oct 10, 2013, at 1:16 PM, Eric Mill notifications@github.com wrote:

Definitely, as a starting point. I'm pretty big on readability and accessibility though, not legal precision. So I imagine they'd need a lot of rewriting.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub.

waldoj commented 10 years ago

@konklone and I talked last week about using the defined terms within installations of The State Decoded. The problem is that, as he says, they're awfully thick with legalese, and often recurse into other definitions. But what we thought would be a good idea was to a) combine the defined terms from a few installations and figure that any term that exists in X legal codes is a term that we should provide a generic definition for and b) extract common words and phrases from those multiply defined terms to automatically assemble a proposed list of synonyms.

To answer your question, the plan that Eric put forward was to provide multiple definitions, simply one after the other, as is done in a standard English dictionary. We discussed other approaches, but agreed that they added unnecessary complexity at this point.