Graphie: A network-based visual interface for UK's Primary Legislation

TL;DR

Graphie is a network-based visual interface that enables users to explore the hierarchical structure of UK legislation, making legal content more accessible and navigable through interactive visualization tools.

Contribution

It introduces a scalable, versatile platform that visualizes UK Acts as network graphs, enhancing legal document exploration beyond traditional text-based methods.

Findings

Effective visualization of the Housing Act 2004 hierarchy

User-friendly navigation with interactive features

Scalable platform adaptable to various legal documents

Abstract

We present Graphie, a novel navigational interface to visualize Acts and Bills included in the UK's legislation digital repository [legislation.gov.uk]. Graphie provides a network representation of the hierarchical structure of an Act of Parliament, which is typically organized in a tree-like fashion according to the content and information contained in each sub-branch. Nodes in Graphie represent sections of an Act (or individual provisions), while links embody the hierarchical connections between them. The legal map provided by Graphie is easily navigable by hovering on nodes, which are also color-coded and numbered to provide easily accessible information about the underlying content. The full textual content of each node is also available on a dedicated hyperlinked canvas. The building block of Graphie is Sofia, an offline data pipeline designed to support different data visualizations by parsing and modelling data provided by [legislation.gov.uk] in open access form. While we focus on the Housing Act 2004 for illustrative purposes, our platform is scalable, versatile, and provides users with a unified toolbox to visualize and explore the UK legal corpus in a fast and user-friendly way.