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Building altlaw.org
Audience: Web Developers, Digital Librarians
Technical Level: moderate
Further discussion about open-source legal research will take place at http://lawcommons.org/ and the mailing list at http://groups.google.com/group/lawcommons-dev
Stuart Sierra talks about building AltLaw -- http://altlaw.org/
Final version of slides: Attach:altlaw_slides_cali2008.pdf
Some "extra" slides, for possible discussion: Attach:altlaw_extra_slides.pdf
AltLaw is a free, open-source legal research tool, an alternative to Lexis and Westlaw. It provides a database and full-text search for over 700,000 Supreme and Federal Appeals court cases.
This session will be about how AltLaw was built, what worked, what didn't, what we learned, and where we want to go next. Our journey will touch on some of the following:
- Web Front-End
- Ruby on Rails, what it's good for, what it's not good for
- Building a Search Engine
- Lucene, the Java text search library
- Ferret, a Ruby port of Lucene
- Solr, a Java search server
- Dealing with big data sets
- Why SQL databases don't work
- RDF, and why it doesn't work either
- Hadoop, an open-source clone of Google's MapReduce distributed data processing framework
- Amazon Web Services: S3 and EC2
- Privacy and Internet case law
Stuart Sierra
Asst. Director, Program on Law & Technology
http://columbialawtech.org/
Columbia University Law School
ssierr at law dot columbia dot edu
Watch the video.
