Base of Brazilian Legal Norms: an Open Government Data Initiative

The legal norms, produced through the Legislative Process, are the formal basis for regulating coexistence in society. Therefore, they are naturally drafted in a technical way with the aim of being interpreted legally. In this paper, however, we present a series of automatic transformations applied to the framework of federal laws in order to structure the information described in these documents with the aim of preparing them for different types of automatic interpretations, such as identification of named entities, definitions, references, creation, alteration and closure events of legal institutions, recovery of the current version of a law in time. This aims to support information activities that go beyond legal interpretation itself, aligned with Open Government Data. The article describes a series of datasets containing the results of transformations of the Brazilian legal norms base, which include the articulated texts of the norms in LexML, CoNLL-U, syntactic representations of sentences obtained with the Google Natural Language Processing API, among others.