Out with old, in with the new - a one-year assessment of lawatlas workbench, a web-based content management system to support the measurement of law over space and time

The National Program Office for Public Health Law Research (PHLR) launched LawAtlas.org in October 2012. LawAtlas is designed specifically to facilitate the building and graphical display of quantitative legal datasets. It enables researchers to create custom web pages that allow users to interact with the data and the associated legal texts through queries and maps. LawAtlas.org is linked to a web-based content management system called Workbench. It was developed to provide a platform for compiling legal texts and coding their mechanistic features. Workbench is designed to increase the accuracy and efficiency of legal measurement projects. It allows researchers to automate the creation of databases for organizing legal texts, and coding forms for measuring the features of associated laws. When legal datasets are built inside the Workbench a simple staging process pushes the data automatically to the LawAtlas portal.

Methods: We designed a web-based system to support the infinite storage of laws collected to measure the evolution of specific legal topics over time and to have the discrete features mapped on LawAtlas.org.

Results: Systematically collecting and coding statutes, regulations, case law, ordinances and other policy over time is feasible. Transiting our original United States boundary map to a Google-Map API allowed global, county and non-municipal geographic boundaries can be displayed on LawAtlas. Use of key Workbench features allowed simplification of redundant coding and calculation of reliability measures for systematic annual or bi-annual updates for all stored datasets.