The Court Data Standardization Project

Purpose

Our courts are a defining pillar of democracy, and empowering citizens to engage with this essential government institution through accurate and accessible data has never been more important.

As more individuals turn to online search engines for information, the need for mature tools to assist in finding the location of the correct court for a legal matter has grown. The Court Data Standardization Project has partnered with court administrators and their information technology specialists to create a court data standard that will support the transfer of information between courts and information providers such as Google, Apple, and Microsoft so that individuals can find information on the courts they need.

The ultimate goal of the project is to provide citizens with the most accessible, accurate, and relevant information about their local and state courts, and to be able to direct them to the services they need.

Approach

The Court Data Standardization Project analyzed a number of state court systems to identify data points that would be most useful to the public, as well as easily maintainable by court administrators. Over the course of the project state court administrators and other legal professionals discussed common terminology and participated in process modeling exercises to understand how local court information is stored and shared. The project then mapped the identified relevant data points to existing propererties of Schema.org, a web metadata standardization project founded by Google, so that the information made available through this project will be consumable by existing search engines and tools.

While an effort has been made to include court administrators and other professionals in the legal system space in the development of this data standard, the identified terms may not at this time be representative of all that may be included in the final format, nor may they all be applicable to every court system. If you would like to provide feedback or suggestions on the data standard, please contact courtdata@turnout.rocks.