I’ve kicked off this taxonomy creation/refinement by gathering three existing legal issue taxonomies, from very kind legal aid groups and — at the largest scale — the National Subject Matter Index. (The NSMI was the most deliberately funded and well-hosted legal issue ontology — so ideally our team can propose some edits and overhauls of it, so that all of the effort that went into it will not be abandoned.)
I have been reading these ontology terms, printing them, rearranging them, and playing with labels for them. I’ve also been trying to apply them to people’s Legal Advice board posts on Reddit.
Surprise: a large number of the legal advice questions that I’ve reviewed from Reddit do not actually show up in the legal aid/NSMI taxonomies. There’s lots of reworking to do! These missing issues include many, many stories around:
- bullying and harassment
- annoying neighbors, annoying neighbor dogs, and annoying strangers (even annoying grocery stores)
- accidents of all kinds (there are many, many accidents happening to Reddit users — snowmobiles, wet cement, power washing, and more)
- privacy concerns about information online and off
- IP, licensing, and use of others’ creations
Somehow these categories of problems haven’t yet made it into legal aid-produced issue taxonomies (likely since they are not priorities, or funders don’t support this type of legal aid work). But there seems a significant demand for legal help (at least from users of Reddit).
Today I spent the day marinating in all the current taxonomies’ terms and layers, to try to come out with a more coherent draft of a radically refined NSMI.
My goal is to get a working version of the Legal Help Issues taxonomy set up (knowing that we’ll likely spot more new issues as we encounter more people’s stories). We need a first version, which has an essential list of core parent categories and sub-issues. As we begin training our machines learning models to spot legal issues, we have a good taxonomy that we are basing our labels on.