Open Government
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Sponsored by:
Parliamentary Counsel Office
"Definer " by Mohammad Abdullatif
Description
Definer's tag cloud really reveals different legislative emphasis and the definition tool is useful and informative. This was the application that all the judges liked. Category sponsored by Parliamentary Counsel Office
$2000 is awarded to the application that best encourages government transparency, access and insight into government information or services.
Selected Judges' Comments
"Smart, useful know that it is filling a gap in the market, easy to use and follow the concept presented"
"Definer finds some modest new value in government data that was not in the mind of the authors - always a good sign that you're on to something. The implementation is also clean."
Mohammad's Description of the entry:
Definer is a dictionary of all terms defined in the New Zealand Acts of Parliament. Definer provides three services on top of the dictionary. The law in New Zealand impacts our life deeply. We interact with it and discuss it regularly, yet there is no dictionary available online which lists the meanings of the terms defined in the law. If I am arguing with a friend over the legal meaning of a term, it is hard to come to an agreement or find an answer quickly. That is where Definer comes in! Definer is a dictionary of all terms defined in the New Zealand Acts available online on the NZ Legislation website. Definer provides three services: 1. Term Index: All terms defined in the Acts are presented using an alphabetical index. The terms have been extracted from the Acts and only their definitions are shown. 2. Smart Search: Some terms are defined across multiple Acts and therefore have multiple definitions. Definer allows searching through the terms and presents all definitions of the term along with the act name, part and section in which the term was defined to show the context of the definition. 3. Cloud Timeline The timeline presents a tag cloud of the most frequent terms in their Acts by decade starting from the year 1900. This is to show the different themes present in the law across the different decades. Each tag in the cloud represents a term and can be clicked on to view its definition(s). Benefits of Definer: - Allows finding legal meanings of terms quickly across all Acts with an easy to use interface that shows only the definition of a term and not the whole section where the term is defined - Provides an alphabetical index of all terms defined in the Acts of Parliament that are available online - Shows the different themes present in the law per decade since 1900 - Available publicly and is free of charge I hope students, journalists, lawyers and everyone else finds it useful!
Sources
All terms and definitions have been extracted from the freely available Acts under the NZ legislation website. New Zealand Acts have no copyright and thus can be used without permission.
