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Accessibility
Quality
Reliability
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We enable collaborations between researchers, technical experts, practitioners and organisations to create a shared vocabulary, standards and protocols for open judicial data sets, shared infrastructure and resources to host and explain available judicial data.
The objective is to drive and sustain advocacy on the quality and limitations of Indian judicial data and engage the judicial data community to enable cross-learning among various projects.
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An index or comparative framework that studies websites of judicial institutions to analyse what information is available, how complete & easy to find it is and how reliable websites are for different user types.
An interactive database where registered users can “create” definition pages within an umbrella taxonomy
An explorer that compiles different ‘types’ of judicial data to help better explain their nature, variety and the landscape.
A standardized set of concepts and relationships that can be used to improve knowledge management and data integration in the Indian law and justice system.
Accessibility and understanding of judicial data are essential to making courts and tribunals more transparent, accountable and easy to navigate for litigants. In recent years, eCourts services and various Court and tribunals’ websites have made a large volume of data about cases available. This has expanded the window into judicial functioning and enabled more empirical research on the role of courts in the protection of citizen’s rights. Such research can also assist busy courts understand patterns of litigation and practice and can help engage across disciplines with stakeholders to improve functioning of courts.
Some pioneering initiatives in the judicial data landscape include research such as DAKSH’s database; annual India Justice Reports; and studies of court functioning during the pandemic and quality of eCourts data; open datasets including Development Data Lab’s Judicial Data Portal containing District & Taluka court cases (2010-2018) and platforms that collect them such as Justice Hub; and interactive databases such as the Vidhi JALDI Constitution Bench Pendency Project.
These individuals and organisations have individually developed different processes to remove noise, identify outliers, classify case and hearing-level data, map case life-cycles, develop appropriate metrics, and mask personal information in the judicial data sets. The time has come for all interested parties to collaborate and combine their efforts to create a shared vocabulary and to develop common standards for such analyses.
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The mandate, agenda and nature of work of this collaborative will be determined jointly by its members
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