Graphie A network-based visual interface for UKs Pri- mary Legislation Evan Tzanis Pierpaolo Vivo Yanik-Pascal F orster Luca Gamberi and Alessia

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Graphie: A network-based visual interface for UK’s Pri-

mary Legislation

Evan Tzanis, Pierpaolo Vivo, Yanik-Pascal F ¨

orster, Luca Gamberi, and Alessia

Annibale

Quantitative and Digital Law Lab, Department of Mathematics, King’s College London, Strand, WC2R 2LS, London

(United Kingdom) - Quantlaw.co.uk

Abstract We present Graphie, a novel navigational interface to visualize Acts and

Bills included in the UK’s legislation digital repository legislation.gov.uk.Graphie

provides a network representation of the hierarchical structure of an Act of Parlia-

ment, which is typically organized in a tree-like fashion according to the content and

information contained in each sub-branch. Nodes in Graphie represent sections

of an Act (or individual provisions), while links embody the hierarchical connections

between them. The legal map provided by Graphie is easily navigable by hovering

on nodes, which are also color-coded and numbered to provide easily accessible

information about the underlying content. The full textual content of each node is

also available on a dedicated hyperlinked canvas. The building block of Graphie

is Soﬁa, an ofﬂine data pipeline designed to support different data visualizations

by parsing and modelling data provided by legislation.gov.uk in open access form.

While we focus on the Housing Act 2004 for illustrative purposes, our platform is

scalable, versatile, and provides users with a uniﬁed toolbox to visualize and ex-

plore the UK legal corpus in a fast and user-friendly way.

Keywords: legal data science, legislation, data pipelines, network interfaces, visualization of legal

texts, user interface

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arXiv:2210.02165v1 [cs.CY] 5 Oct 2022

1 Introduction

The volume of the UK’s primary legislation keeps growing at a very fast pace. According to a rough (and probably

outdated) estimate, there are at least 176,890 1Public and General Acts currently in force in the UK - the exact number

is not known - and an average of 30 new Public Acts are produced every year [1]. New legislation 2documents are

regularly uploaded to the UK’s Legislation web platform (legislation.gov.uk,[2]), managed by The National

Archives 3(TNA) on behalf of HM Government.

Users may reach the legislation.gov.uk webpage while looking for a speciﬁc Act or provision on standard search

engines. Others may use the platform as part of their daily job. The legislation.gov.uk website has been carefully

designed and is maintained to cater for the needs of a diverse pool of stakeholders. It is built on clear principles and

offers a number of essential features: ﬁrst, users can keyword-query the database, and are offered an easy-to-use set

of navigational links for browsing through different corners of the UK legislation. Secondly, legislation data are open-

source and fully accessible via an API 4. All API legal documents are held in XML format under a well deﬁned and

concise set of persistent URIs 5. Thanks to this API technology and to TNA’s open-access philosophy, the legislation

data can also be connected and streamlined across other data sets and applications, such as for instance Westlaw [4],

a leading commercial legal research platform. In addition, the legislation.gov.uk platform enables users to enjoy

the textual version of a whole Act – or a section/paragraph thereof – in HTML or in PDF formats. Acts are made available

in both their original (as enacted) or revised (current) versions, and for those Acts with revisions, a detailed timeline

highlighting any editing changes to legal documents over time is also provided (see ﬁg. 1).

Figure 1. Section 194 of the Housing Act 2004 as provided by [2]. The default visualization offering includes (i) plain

text of the provision (with limited hyperlinking) (ii) time-slider to access different versions of the provision (iii) choice

between latest version, or version as originally enacted.

The standard set by TNA in terms of offering a digital and navigable version of essentially the entire corpus of UK

legislation is very high and very competitive on the world stage. However, the lack of easy “hopping” capabilities

1reported numbers till 2016, in [1]

2available here: www.legislation.gov.uk/new

3https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk

4the UK Legislation API, https://www.legislation.gov.uk/index

5https://www.legislation.gov.uk/developer/uris

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between items and provisions that should be naturally linked together, as well as its focus on a text-only rendering of

provisions leaves room for some improvement.

As for academic papers, reading and understanding legislation requires concentration and time, and the ability to efﬁ-

ciently ‘follow the leads’ between different provisions of the same Act – or between different Acts that have a bearing on

the same matter. Consider again section 194 of the Housing Act 2004 as our main example, which is highly connected6

with other sections from different Acts of the UK’s Statute Book. To fully understand the content and implications of

section 194, the reader is expected to visit and read the sections of these other statutes referenced there ﬁrst, and then

hop onto the sections/provisions that these other sections might refer to, and to repeat this hopping routine exhaus-

tively, covering all possible linkages between sections/provisions/statutes. Using a text-based visualization interface

with limited hyperlinking capabilities such as that provided by [2]makes these tasks time-consuming and inefﬁcient

for long and highly interconnected sections.

Thus, there is a need for improved tools and visualizations to help both occasional and professional users manage

potentially demanding explorations into legal documents. This is exactly the aim of Graphie 7, which provides a

different and more attractive palette of network visualization tools (see an example in ﬁg. 2) that may prove useful for

law researchers and practitioners, as well as for the general public.

Before describing the main technical features and capabilities of Graphie, we put our enterprise in the wider context

of Legal Map systems and similar initiatives, highlighting overlaps and differences.

Figure 2. An inbound weighted representation of the Housing Act 2004 in Graphie. On the left, the web of provisions

joined by a link whenever two of them can be reached in one-hop from one another. Nodes are color-coded (and the

shape of the node marker can be changed too) to reﬂect – in this particular case – which Part of the Act each node

belongs to. Hovering with the mouse over each node retrieves the textual content embedded in the node (on the right).

Moving from each provision to its ‘neighbors’ no longer requires refreshing/clicking on hyperlinks, but simply wandering

around with the mouse over the nodes of interest.

Related Work The philosophy and technical construction behind Graphie do not write on a blank slate. The concept

of a Legal Map system and its theoretical framework were already introduced in [5].Legal Maps are multi-layered

systems offering an end-user experience similar to the user interfaces provided by geographic navigation systems, such

as Google Maps. From a mathematical perspective, a Legal Map is a directed multi-graph (network) that contains

all the structural items of a given legal document [6].Legal Map visualizations could unlock dependencies between

legal entities that may be difﬁcult to extract otherwise, from identifying the most “important” nodes in a network, to

clustering nodes according to a given notion of similarity.

The use of tools from complexity science and network theory to analyze and represent legal texts has a relatively short

but already fruitful history: arguably, the newly minted ‘Physics of the Law’ ﬁeld [7]will play the same role to Law

that “Econophysics” had to Economics [8], and “Biophysics” to Biology (e.g. [9]) in terms of cross-fertilization of ideas

between distinct domains. An extensive graph-theoretic approach to the EU legislation network is given in [6]. In [10]

the tree-hierarchical network of the U.S. Code is examined by considering several scoring and ranking metrics. Ref.

[11]builds a hierarchical model of information (distributed on the nodes of a tree) and deﬁnes a notion of “structural

6This means that section 194 includes multiple references to other statutes.

7https://graphie.quantlaw.co.uk/

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Graphie:Anetwork-basedvisualinterfaceforUK'sPri-maryLegislationEvanTzanis,PierpaoloVivo,Yanik-PascalF¨orster,LucaGamberi,andAlessiaAnnibaleQuantitativeandDigitalLawLab,DepartmentofMathematics,King'sCollegeLondon,Strand,WC2R2LS,London(UnitedKingdom)-Quantlaw.co.ukAbstractWepresentGraphie,anovelnaviga...

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Graphie A network-based visual interface for UKs Pri- mary Legislation Evan Tzanis Pierpaolo Vivo Yanik-Pascal F orster Luca Gamberi and Alessia

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