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Datasets

The Lab produces open research data that is available to others. Examples of datasets are:
 

  • Case Law Explorer. In the Case Law Explorer project, we are developing an API that allows fetching metadata, full-texts, and network statistics for Dutch and European case law. The extraction process is explained on the Maastricht Law & Tech Lab GitHub ETL page.
     
  • Rechtspraak (Dutch case law) extractor. This library contains functions to obtain published Dutch case law (rechtspraak) data and available metadata associated to the cases. The required user input is limited to the start date, end date, (optional) the number of cases that should be retrieved, and whether the data should be stored in a file (csv) or in a dataframe.
     
  • BSARD. This repository contains the Belgian Statutory Article Retrieval Dataset (BSARD) (in French), as well as the code to reproduce the experimental results from the associated paper by Antoine Louis, Jerry Spanakis, and Gijs van Dijck. Statutory article retrieval is the task of automatically retrieving law articles relevant to a legal question. While recent advances in natural language processing have sparked considerable interest in many legal tasks, statutory article retrieval remains primarily untouched due to the scarcity of large-scale and high-quality annotated datasets. To address this bottleneck, we introduce BSARD, which consists of 1,100+ French native legal questions labeled by experienced jurists with relevant articles from a corpus of 22,600+ Belgian law articles. Detailed documentation on the dataset and how to reproduce the main experimental results can be found on the Maastricht Law & Tech Lab GitHub BSARD page.
     
  • Cancel Culture Data Set. A first Cancel Culture Corpus data set with of over 2.3 million tweets and a framework to enlarge it further. A detailed analysis of the data set is provided, and a set of features proposed, based on various models including sentiment analysis and emotion detection that can help characterizing cancel culture.

Software

The Maastricht Law and Tech Lab offers the following software:

Case Law Explorer is a software application that allows non-technical users to conduct network analysis in order to find landmark cases. The application can be found here. More information about the project can be found under Research > Case Law Explorer page.

GraphDoc is a free, open source, and user-friendly graphical interface that allows building decision trees. It does not require any installation and can be run online. The output can be pasted or loaded into Docassemble, a free and open-source expert system for guided interviews. The codebase can be found here.

Our Social Security Tool, which assists in determining in which Member State social security premiums need to be paid in case a worker performs activities simultaneously in two or more Member States, was developed with the Legal Decision Tree Builder.

The Hypothesis Custom Tags extension adds the feature of importing custom annotation tags from an input CSV file, either from a remote URL on the Web or from a local file. The code and documentation can be found here. An OWL ontology to define terms from EU company law that are relevant for cross-border mobility of EU companies can be found here.

TrackerControl is an open-source Android privacy app. The app establishes a local VPN and analyses other apps’ network traffic. This allows users to study and block tracking of their app use by tech companies such as Google and Facebook. The app is available in 21 languages and has been used by several civil society organisations and researchers, e.g. by Sitra, noyb, and the EU-funded CSI-COP citizen science project.

Code

Find our code for these and other projects on GitHub.