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Welcome to the LegisLink wiki!

The purpose of this Wiki is to provide a collaborative space to discuss, build, and maintain http://legislink.org. LegisLink uses intuitive human-readable URLs to link to legislative data at the document and sub-document levels.

Legislative documents reside on various government legislative websites in various formats (TXT, HTML, XML, PDF, WordPerfect). URLs for these documents are often too long or difficult to construct. More importantly, links to internal locations (the citations within the law) are often not supported or non-intuitive for users to create or use. For most legislative websites, users must click through or fill out forms and then scroll or search for the specific location in the text of legislation. This makes getting to citations directly difficult, if not impossible.

The main goal of LegisLink.org is to provide the legislative and Internet communities with a web service that resolves simplified citation-based URLs to sublevels of various legislative documents. LegisLink works using one of two approaches: when the legislative document contains anchors (a URL can be created that points to the correct location), the LegisLink redirects the user to the government's site (without the user having to scroll and search). when the legislative document doesn't contain anchors, LegisLink copies the file to the LegisLink server and inserts only the required anchor to provide direct access to the sub-level location. The script does the search and scrolling for the user.

The site is organized by jurisdiction. The prototype is currently being built to handle the United States(us), Colorado (us-co), and New Zealand (nz). The source code is available as text files at http://legislink.org/code.html.

This project cannot be accomplished by one or two people. Your help is needed whether you are an interested user or a software developer. At this point, the code is written in Perl. Please use this wiki site to add and discuss related information. If you're a developer and want to help, please email me. Thanks.

Joe Carmel

Proposed LegisLink Formats

Rules for URLs

Using CSS to Enhance Cited Sections

CSS Tips for Anchor Links to Cited Sections XPointer as a Citation Enabler XPointer for Citations