Chains of RFCs and Chains of Laws?

AlexNicoll writes "I recently completed a DNSSEC library for the .NET platform (thanks to Wouter @ NLNetLabs for his help!). While writing the library, I encountered the extremely entertaining concept of following the long chain of DNS-related RFCs on the IETF website. Some RFCs were obsoleted, some were updated, some updates were obsoleted by others, and some were never really formally related or linked — so even finding them was a challenge in search-fu. Finally, I think I got the whole picture, but I'm not sure. Then I got to thinking: searching for the relevant RFCs in IETF RFC chains was a lot like trying to figure out how (in the US) local, regional, state, and federal laws interact with themselves and each other. Since I just recently moved, I thought I ought to know the rules of the place I live in. It turns out to be just as non-trivial, if not more so, than parsing RFC chains. So here's the question: given that the processes are somewhat similar, does anyone know of a project that has tried to consolidate all the information in one place, so that it's in one comprehensive and up-to-date document, for either laws or RFCs?" Update: 05/24 14:24 GMT by KD : Ray Bellis from Nominet took up the challenge and compiled dependency graphs for DNS-related RFCs.

Comments

Re:Refactoring

[Anpheus]

How about we version control the legal code, consider amendments to be patches, new laws to be insertions into the relevant sections, and deprecated text removed in a deletion patch?

State governments could then add their own changeset to the upstream (Federal) laws where they can and also maintain their own single cohesive text as a version controlled document.

Unfortunately such a thing is probably decades if not centuries away.

Re:Refactoring

[DynamicPhil]

Well, someone (a hobbyist) is doing just that (in Sweden, with Swedish law): https://lagen.nu/

Technologically, he has a description of what he does. I'll try to translate:
he fetches laws from the Cabinet Office web server, which he converts into XML (XHTML2 med RDFa)

He then retrieves cases from the Courts Administration FTP server, also converts this into XML. (via words "save as HTML", and then converting).

He then compiles all the meta-data from all the documents into RDF -graph. This is used in conjunction with style sheets to create XHTML1.0 pages, ready for displaying in a browser.

finally, indexes and Table of contents are created and the result is hosted on Apache-servers. The code is written in python, with parts in XSLT.

Impressive, impressive work. Which landed him a job in e-gov (I hope he keeps the law-project going!)