MindMelder

About Mind Melder

Mind Melder is a rudimentary IDE and interpreter for a very basic scripting language (we called it LegalScript) based on concepts defined by Sergio de Cesare and Guido L. Geerts in their paper Toward a Perdurantist Ontology of Contracts (included in this repo). The basic idea is that companies can be defined as a bundle of contracts and that the relationships between companies and contracts can be abstracted into a discrete set of elements (objects).

This was initially presented by Jonathan Moore and Boris Polania (bpolania) at Code the Deal.

Even though LegalScript was intended to be a prototype for the Code the Deal hack and in some parts (mostly the contracts paragraphs and meta-data) it’s hard-coded, it essentially confirmed some of Cesare and Geerts’ assumptions about the parts and relationships inside a contract. Nevertheless javascript proved to be not a good tool for text processing, so for any further advancements in the creation of a scripting language would be more effective if tools like flex and bison are used.

Finally, Mind Melder served mostly as a tool for showing  the idea to a public (i.e. hackathon judges and general public) but it’s our opinion that on the long term it could evolve to be an integrated IDE/SDK for LegalScript or something like it.

Legal Hackers hopes that its members and followers will more fully develop the ontology of LegalScript, as well as develop some applications for it (how about a GUI?).  We think there are a number of further applications for this project:

• The log of commands could serve as metadata for a document that could be read, or written, by humans (and machines) more quickly.

• Humans could write scripts that automate the creation of hundreds of documents in a few seconds, with little to no technical knowledge (or knowledge of MS Word's more automatable features).

• In some cases, it may be possible to hardcode and detect bugs and logical inconsistencies in contracts.  E.g., you could get an error message if you use an undefined term.

• Defining terms and cross-referencing terms and sections in a very easy way.