identifiers

Background

[this is mostly a placeholder for now -- unedited notes follow]

Here's what we have in mind:

oai_lii:law.cornell.edu:us/federal/scotus/00-201-ZO-html

This example is the identifier for the majority opinion in NY Times v. Tasini. It breaks into
scheme:namespace-identifier:local-identifier

-- the scheme oai_lii should be the same for all identifiers, everywhere, and will eventually
be associated with a series of standards documents and formal xml schemas.

The following was written (by Dave Shetland and Tom Bruce)  as a position statement for the Workshop on Legislative XML associated with the 2007 JURIX conference in Leiden:

URN:lex is a proposed Internet standard for legal document identifiers written by Pierluigi Spinosa, Enrico Francesconi, and Caterina Lupo.  It is intended to coexist with (and provide important infrastructure for) more semantically-laden approaches like LegisLink and Citability.

The URN:lex proposal is here.

Here are some "worked examples" of URN:lex identifiers, to act as a guide for those implementing URN:lex on their sites. Discussion of URN:lex is taking place here.

United States

Federal law

Legislation

United States Code (per the Legal Information Institute):

For now, we are implementing US Code URNs inside <meta> tags, along the lines of the following example: