For over 50 years, lawyers have used process models to describe how information and decisions move. Lexipedia, developed by the Center for Civic Innovation and the University of Virginia, describes legal processes using modern procedural standards such as BPMN (Business Process Model Notation) and Petri Nets.
Process models describe how things happen, but offer no convenient discovery mechanism. Lexipedia's latest release adds linking to pull Wikidata entries in directly, plus a QuickStatements generator for the Lexipedia Wikibase — where laws, case law, and other content not yet ready for the Wikidata ecosystem can await community review.
Linked data adds further value through specific legal ontologies: Akoma Ntoso, which correlates legal axioms across global legal systems, and deontic logic, which defines logic from language.
Cross-referencing legal concepts is self-explanatory; deontic logic is more nuanced. For example, if one MUST do something, it's implied there's a consequence for not doing it. In legal texts these statements often aren't adjacent, and get left out of models. Describing content with deontic logic lets us run a baseline "legal linting" pass that improves models and simplifies review.
