Computational Legal Studies™

Along with a non-trivial subset of the legal blogosphere, we eagerly await the Supreme Court’s decision in the Bilski case. Perhaps tomorrow will be the day?  In the meantime, here are a variety of thoughts on the matter.  Bilski Blog / EFF / Now Europe / PatentlyO / GenomicsLawReport / Ipwatchdog / Fenwick&West / InsideCounsel. This one from Greg Laden is also fun.

Also from the good folks at Google Scholar comes caselaw and patents together with metadata, page tags and a nice “how cited” feature.  Here is the announcement from the GoogleBlog. Useful analysis available at Legal Informatics Blog, Just in Case and Internet for Lawyers. Enjoy!

The United States Patent and Trademark Office patent classification scheme organizes 3 million patents into about 160,000 distinct patent classes. This visualization by Katy Börner, Elisha Hardy, Bruce W. Herr II, Todd M. Holloway, & W. Bradford Paley considers the organizational schema used to classify patents at the US Patent Office.  Their article Taxonomy Visualization in Support of the Semi-Automatic Validation and Optimization of Organizational Schemas was published in the Journal of Informetrics in 2007.

From the Abstract: “The taxonomy visualization and validation (TV) tool introduced in this paper supports the semi-automatic validation and optimization of organizational schemas such as file directories, classification hierarchies, taxonomies, or other structures imposed on a data set for organization, access, and naming. By showing the “goodness of fit” for a schema and the potentially millions of entities it organizes, the TV tool eases the identification and reclassification of misclassified information entities, the identification of classes that grow too large, the evaluation of the size and homogeneity of existing classes, the examination of the “well-formedness” of an organizational schema, and more.”