South african law/Acts database

shooter69

shooter69

Expert Member
Joined
Jun 4, 2012
Messages
3,436
Reaction score
983
Location
Dark Africa
Hi,

I am looking to import the south African law into a database(Acts).

What would be the best way to do this?

The best thing would be if anyone of you know of such a database already(I don't want to reinvent the wheel). This would be great and speed up things for me.

ps. Have a good day devs.
 
Good question - I wonder if the DB exists already..

If it doesn't, I would imagine it's a lot of grunt work to populate a new DB with such information.
Manually is one way as I believe it's all in text / online format.

Unless there is a clever way (Like Optical character recognition ) for example that could help speed it up?
 
I know there is company that gives you everything on a DVD to access and it installs a program and you read the data off the DVD like an offline internet but I forgot the name. The db I imagine would be protected and would go against the terms to get it as although the acts are public the formatting of it is done by the company.

I would suggest getting the paper copies scanning it and OCRing it yourself.
 
nfbs said:
I would suggest getting the paper copies scanning it and OCRing it yourself.
Click to expand...

:D

That's going to take ages and ages and ages and longer.
I opened one of the Acts that I have, the Electronic Communications Act, 2005... it's 64 pages. I've got a few that's even longer. There's thousands and thousands of pages of content in all the acts combined.
 
Go and and all kinds of acts and go to www.acts.co.za

From there you can easily compile your own DB with the copy and pasting method. May take a while, but eventually you may have all acts in your DB.
 
House said:
Go and and all kinds of acts and go to www.acts.co.za

From there you can easily compile your own DB with the copy and pasting method. May take a while, but eventually you may have all acts in your DB.
Click to expand...

Copy and pasting is the last thing I want to do. lol
I actually figured out a way. Its just going to take some programming from my side.

Insert each line into the database via console app and then assign Chapter and headings to each line. simple as that.


test.jpg
 
Assuming there are no legal reasons not to, it should be easy to write a scraper.

Maybe index the data cleverly in Solr so that it is easily searchable and profit?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top
Sign up to the MyBroadband newsletter
X