Don't Tie a Horse To a Tree and Other Open Data Lessons

itwbennett writes "Baltimore this week became the first city to hop on the open data bandwagon with the launch of the Baltimore Decoded website. The site makes the city's charter and codes more accessible to the public and will eventually include information on court decisions, legislative tracking and city technical standards (e.g., building regulations, zoning restrictions, fire codes). The site also offers a RESTful, JSON-based API for accessing the data. ITworld's Phil Johnson dug in and found these lesser-known Baltimore codes: You can't hold more than 1 yard sale every 6 months, you can't tie a horse to a tree, and you can't have fruit on a wharf. What you do with this information is up to you."

Comments

No Horse/Tree Connectivity?

[Anonymous Coward]

What kind of place is Baltimore if their "openness" doesn't allow horse/tree connectivity? I realize it's probably IP/patent related, but geez folks, can't we work this out?

Re:No Horse/Tree Connectivity?

[chromas]

can't we work this out?

Neigh.

Re:No Horse/Tree Connectivity?

[SCPRedMage]

Hay now, do we really need these stupid puns?

Re:No Horse/Tree Connectivity?

[Anonymous Coward]

Horses use LTE-A and 802.11ac. One thing is about horses is they're all champs with the bits.

Re:No Horse/Tree Connectivity?

[Mitchell314]

Stop it with this childish game right now! Or do I hoof to put you down?

Re:No Horse/Tree Connectivity?

[cultiv8]

can't we work this out?

Neigh.

Stop horsing around.

Re:No Horse/Tree Connectivity?

[JustOK]

Nag, nag, nag.

Re:No Horse/Tree Connectivity?

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop it with this childish game right now! Or do I hoof to put you down?

Stop trying to rein us in.

Re:No Horse/Tree Connectivity?

[ShanghaiBill]

What kind of place is Baltimore if their "openness" doesn't allow horse/tree connectivity? I realize it's probably IP/patent related, but geez folks, can't we work this out?

Probable actual reason: A horse tied to a tree will gnaw on the bark. If they gnaw away a ring around the trunk, the tree will die. If it is your tree, on your own property, fine. But if it is my tree, and I have not given you permission, or it is a tree on public property, it is perfectly reasonable for it to be illegal for you to tie your horse to it.

The other laws seem reasonable too. What if you neighbor starts collecting goods and holding a garage sale everyday? When does it become a commercial enterprise in a residential area? I am not sure I would draw the line a twice a year, but if zoning means anything, they have to draw a line somewhere.

Fruit on a wharf attracts fruit eating insects, which can spread to/from ships, encouraging the transfer of invasive species. It is a reasonable law.

Re:No Horse/Tree Connectivity?

[plover]

Stop trying to rein us in.

Thank you! That is the first time this month anyone on slashdot has correctly spelled the phrase "rein in".

Re:No Horse/Tree Connectivity?

[ShanghaiBill]

Probable actual reason: A horse tied to a tree will gnaw on the bark. If they gnaw away a ring around the trunk, the tree will die.

God damn, how long are you leaving it tied there? It'll be close to starving before it starts to do that.

It depends on the size and type of tree. Many trees have thick bark and bitter sap. Other trees, such as fruit trees, have thin bark and sweet sap. A horse can kill an apple tree in less than an hour.

Re:No Horse/Tree Connectivity?

[Anonymous Coward]

while that would makes sense it currently works like this

1) make so many new laws every year that it is flatout impossible for any 1 person to have read them all (forget understood and considered)
2) have courts hold 'ignorance of the law is no excuse' as a legal axiom
3) jail anyone you want, anytime you want (you can always find a reason)

welcome to modern tyranny, it's a lot more subtle then old-style tyranny, but ultimately you're still screwed if the powers that be want to screw you.

Re:Two problems

[Shados]

XML may be an over engineered piece of crap, but while JSON isn't perfect, its pretty darn simple and "just works", with very few gotchas... REST is just "use http the way it was designed to be used and not one bit more".

Not too sure where the problem is.

Know the law

[Anonymous Coward]

Finally, A cit where you can figure out what it legal under the city's laws. Now only if you could access the county, state and federal regulations it might be possible to obey the millions of pages of laws that you are subject to. That would be nice, but under common law, you also need all the historical records! Some of those may or may not have existing documentation, and it may be privately held.

We have a legal system that accumulates laws. I'd prefer one that actively put in some re-factoring and simplification work instead of implicitly including all historical laws and decisions, overriding what is changed. How much law can we possible need? It has to be less that what we have.

Re:Know the law

[Anonymous Coward]

It is that way by design. It's difficult to control a law abiding populace, so pass enough laws to make everyone a criminal. Some one gets uppity or steps out of line, you've already got 'em.

Re:Know the law

[L4t3r4lu5]

It's quite a short-sighted view, though. Once everyone's a criminal who faces prison for doing nothing but it being their turn to be made an example of, the rule of law becomes meaningless. There are only two results; Martial law, as in Egypt / Syria right now, or anarchy / tribalism as in the Congo. Neither is a stable state.

A step in the right direction

[BetterSense]

Laws should be tracked, with dependencies, by an apt-like system. Anyone should be able to query what is illegal, without a lawyer. Automated systems can flag unfairness, conflicting laws, and obsolescence.

Lawyers and judges' jobs would be reduced to addressing bugs.

The whole lot should be committed to a git repository (git-blame anyone?). New laws should take the form of pull requests.

Re:A step in the right direction

[FatLittleMonkey]

This always ends badly.

Re:A step in the right direction

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

That's just utterly naive. The law is organic it has to be because it is intended to model human behavior. The idea that you could devise a programmatic way to detect unfairness is laughable - different people have different ideas of unfairness all the time. If people can't uniformly decide on what constitutes "fair" there is no way a computer could without alienating a whole range of people.

The law will always be full of short-comings and automated tools can help to reduce them, but anything beyond that is a recipe for a level of tyranny like the human race has never seen.

Re:A step in the right direction

[Anonymous Coward]

Little known fact: the United States Code is not the definitive compilation of Federal law. The definitive compilation is the "United States States Statutes at Large", which is basically an append-only journal of all of laws passed by Congress. Updates to this log are "traced" by clerks who then update the United States Code appropriately. The USC originally was entirely the handiwork of these clerks because Congressional bills were (and to some extent, still are) basically just random statements of law disembodied from context. These clerks have to organize and codify those statements into something that can be used as a proper reference.

These days many laws are written as diffs against the USC. But these diffs are still appended to the official journal and subsequently applied by the clerks to the code.

These clerks are basically system administrators for the legal machine. They can't read your e-mail, but they could do lots more nefarious things, and no doubt have. It would be the height of ignorance to believe that none of these clerks hasn't inserted or redacted anything. And who else would pour through the journal looking for inconsistencies.

I've personally found interesting tidbits in court opinions. 150+ years ago, court opinions were published by private companies, and 200+ years ago things were often quite shady. Many times there were multiple reporters transcribing oral opinions for publication. As a law student, lawyer, or judge you never really question whether the reporter erred in their transcription.

Fortunately for the skeptical and inquisitive, Google Books has scanned a tremendous amount of old legal report volumes. On more than one occasion I've found different transcriptions of an oral opinion from different reporters (i.e. two different reporters in the court room transcribing arguments and judges' opinions) with material discrepancies that, had one transcription become more popular instead of the other, could have substantially altered the course of laws that we still apply today.

(I'm too lazy to go back to my notes and find these. It's not like they would have altered the course of civilization. Just changed various esoteric rules in Contracts, Torts, etc.)
 

Re:A step in the right direction

[b4dc0d3r]

I have seen such a suggestion numerous times, and still have to remind people:

The people who make the laws have to either implement such a system, or require that it be implemented. Either way, they will fuck it up beyond any value due to endless compromises between the new guy who wants openness, and the old guy whose career was nearly ended by his naive interest in openness early in his career.

I'm not discounting the possibility. In the highly unlikely event that it happens, I am doubting it will work anywhere close to what you want. And probably will be worse. So you're going to need some specifics on the implementation, or you're just hoping for sunshine and unicorn farts.

Re:A step in the right direction

[garyebickford]

There's lots of incorrect assumptions in these comments, but I'll just pick on yours. The first essential problem is that the law is not a logical system although it has some appearances of one, because that's what makes it possible to even begin to make some sort of sense of things. But, even if it were a logical system, it would run into what I like to call the Goedel problem - the Incompleteness Theorem, which states very roughly, any logical system powerful enough to describe itself is incomplete. This means that there are statements that are true but unproveable, and statements that are provable but false, and statements that not even be assigned a truth value (that may appear at first glance to be either true or false).

Just for starters, "This statement is a lie." I visualize all this as a pair of trees, one black and one white, that start from 'true' and 'false' and attempt to cover all of a decision space. It turns out that there are places that can not be reached by either tree, and parts that are in one or the other depending on the angle you look from.

The second essential problem is that a law may require a person to act a certain way, but in a particular circumstance that may be a bad idea. For instance, it is certainly illegal to push someone out a window against their will - but what if you happen to know the room is about to explode? Should you break the law? (This is also why Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics can not be programmed in, but only established the same way our present legal system works - have the robot make a judgment, with the proviso that if they guess 'wrong' in a particular circumstance, they might be punished. This provides a motivation for the robot to do the 'right' thing, and to try to figure out what the right thing is, incorporating knowledge of law and ethics and whatever else might factor in.)

Finally, the legal system has to be viewed as a kind of neural network or similar 'living system' (complex adaptive systems are cool) composed of a large number of 'entities', that continuously tries to converge on an optimum in the context of a continuously varying environment.

Re:A step in the right direction

[DerekLyons]

In a world where the law was alike to computer code - utterly black and white and able to be compared one-to-one with reality, such a thing would make sense and work.

We don't live in such a world.

Re:A step in the right direction

[pr100]

The law, especially in common law jurisdictions like the US, England and a lot of the Commonwealth, does not work just by knowing the statutory rules. There are rules that exist independently of any statute. For example in England (I don't know about the US), murder is not a statutory offence - you won't find any act of Parliament that creates such an offence. It is a creation of the common law.

You therefore need to know all the relevant judgments to get a read on the way things are likely to go in a particular case. These are not necessarily expressed in clear, declarative terms. Judgments meander around mixing up the facts of the particular case with the legal principles involved, surveys of relevant authorities and bits of whimsy (read, for example, Denning's judgment in Miller v Jackson). In England at least it often happens in the higher courts that each judge will write a judgment. They will not all agree - sometimes there will be dissenting judgments. Sometimes judgments will agree about the outcome but for different reasons. Hence it can be hard to understand the legal principles on which the decision was reached.

Now, whilst in some areas it's probably possible to make an expert system that helps in some cases, you'd be crazy to rely on such a thing if you've been charged with a serious offence or have some significant civil dispute. And it's not just a question of trying to figure out which way it's likely to go - the way it's argued in court can make a big difference. You need to muster all the different arguments, based on legal authority, that support your position.

"open law" state?

[Mr. Slippery]

Baltimore is following the lead of Maryland which, earlier this year, became the third open law state,

WTF? Maryland law (both statutes and COMAR) has been on-line for years.

And Baltimore City code has also been on-line for a while.

Maybe this is a nicer interface or something, but pretending that putting laws on-line is some kind of breakthrough is counterfactual.

yard sale

[Khashishi]

If there were no limit on yard sales, then people could just set up a shop in a residential zone.

Re:yard sale

[garyebickford]

A friend of my brother years ago did do that. These two hippies were short on rent, so they went around the neighborhood and and scrounged up a bunch of free stuff, then held a garage sale. It went so well they did it again the next week, and the next. After a year the city told them they had to either quit or get a business license. By then they had already rented a storage unit to keep their inventory, so they went the next step and opened a storefront and called it 'Antiques and Funk'. Last I talked with him (about 1980) he was bitching about the 'hippies coming in and shoplifting'! :D

Fruit on Wharf...

[Andhesaidtome]

The ordinance does not preclude fruit from being on a wharf, just allocates the responsibility for its removal to the Harbour Master if it becomes a nuisance. Given the submission looks like a selfie for ITWorld I'm not surprised there was no fact check.

Laws should automatically expire.

[jtownatpunk.net]

If a law isn't enforced in 10 years (maybe 20), it should automatically expire. If the city/county/state/federal government wants to keep an unenforced law on the books, it should have to be passed again like any other new law.

Re:Two problems

[diamondmagic]

And I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but JSON isn't usually RESTful (there's no hypertext).

REST is a perfectly fine network architecture, it's designed to support forward-comparability and be self-documenting. But most people have no clue what it means.

Like Twitter. Their website is more RESTful than their so-called REST API, it's despicable.

They've gone too far

[wonkey_monkey]

I know the phone companies don't like tethering, but this is ridiculous.