| --- |
| license: cc-by-4.0 |
| language: |
| - en |
| pretty_name: Australian Commonwealth Legislation (jurisd legislation-cth) |
| tags: |
| - legal |
| - australian-law |
| - legislation |
| - commonwealth |
| - statute |
| - embeddings |
| - retrieval |
| - citation-graph |
| size_categories: |
| - 100K<n<1M |
| task_categories: |
| - feature-extraction |
| - sentence-similarity |
| - text-retrieval |
| source_datasets: |
| - umarbutler/open-australian-legal-corpus |
| configs: |
| - config_name: documents |
| data_files: documents.parquet |
| - config_name: chunks |
| data_files: chunks.parquet |
| - config_name: edges |
| data_files: edges.parquet |
| - config_name: unmatched_citations |
| data_files: unmatched_citations.parquet |
| --- |
| |
| # legislation-cth — Australian Commonwealth Legislation (jurisd data module) |
|
|
| A self-contained, offline retrieval module for the **full Commonwealth of Australia |
| legislation corpus**: primary Acts and legislative instruments from the Federal |
| Register of Legislation, segmented into chunks, locally embedded, and cross-linked |
| into a citation graph. It is the baseline data module for |
| [jurisd](https://github.com/russellbrenner/jurisd), an MCP server for |
| Australian/NZ legal research. |
|
|
| Everything here is **CC-BY-4.0 and redistributable** — Commonwealth legislation |
| under the Federal Register of Legislation's CC-BY-4.0 terms, with embeddings |
| generated locally by an open model. No case law (court material is excluded for |
| licensing reasons) and no state/territory legislation. |
|
|
| ## At a glance |
|
|
| | | | |
| |---|---| |
| | Jurisdiction | Commonwealth of Australia | |
| | Documents | 32,143 (4,661 primary Acts + 27,482 legislative instruments) | |
| | Chunks | 857,262 | |
| | Citation-graph edges | 927,210 (783,336 act–provision, 143,874 cites) | |
| | Embedding model | `BAAI/bge-small-en-v1.5` (384-dim, L2-normalised) | |
| | Licence | CC-BY-4.0 | |
| | Snapshot date | 2026-06-13 | |
| | Module version | 0.1.0 | |
|
|
| ## Files |
|
|
| | File | Rows | Description | |
| |------|------|-------------| |
| | `documents.parquet` | 32,143 | One row per legislation document: `version_id`, `work_id`, `type`, `jurisdiction`, `source`, `citation`, `url`, `date`. | |
| | `chunks.parquet` | 857,262 | Segmented text with inline embeddings: `chunk_id`, `version_id`, `segment_type`, `provision_ref`, `char_start`, `char_end`, `text`, `facet`, `facet_confidence`, `embedding` (`fixed_size_list<float>[384]`). | |
| | `edges.parquet` | 927,210 | Citation graph: act–provision containment and cross-document `cites` edges. | |
| | `unmatched_citations.parquet` | 25,399 | Detected citations that did not resolve to an in-corpus target (provenance / coverage honesty). | |
| | `manifest.json` | — | Machine-readable module descriptor: per-file `sha256` + row counts, embedding descriptor, licence block, and the `base_uri` jurisd resolves files against. | |
|
|
| The embeddings are **inline** in `chunks.parquet`, so the module is fully |
| self-contained: no separate vector store and no embedding step needed to query it. |
|
|
| ## Use with jurisd |
|
|
| The jurisd MCP server installs and queries this module directly: |
|
|
| ```bash |
| jurisd fetch-module legislation-cth # downloads + verifies against manifest sha256 |
| jurisd verify-module legislation-cth |
| ``` |
|
|
| A query is embedded locally with the same `bge-small-en-v1.5` model and ranked by |
| cosine similarity over the inline chunk embeddings, entirely offline. |
|
|
| ## Source and provenance |
|
|
| Built from the [Open Australian Legal Corpus](https://huggingface.co/datasets/umarbutler/open-australian-legal-corpus), |
| filtered to Commonwealth primary and secondary legislation. Provenance is pinned in |
| `manifest.json` via the corpus sha256 and the recipe git commit; per-file integrity |
| is enforced by jurisd's `fetch-module` against the manifest `sha256` values on |
| download. |
|
|
| ## Licence and attribution |
|
|
| Released under **CC-BY-4.0**. When redistributing, retain: |
|
|
| - Contains material from the Open Australian Legal Corpus, CC BY 4.0. |
| - Federal Register of Legislation material © Commonwealth of Australia, CC BY 4.0. |
| - Embeddings generated locally with `BAAI/bge-small-en-v1.5` (open, ONNX); offline module class. |
|
|
| ## Citation |
|
|
| ```bibtex |
| @misc{jurisd_legislation_cth_2026, |
| title = {legislation-cth: Australian Commonwealth Legislation retrieval module}, |
| author = {Brenner, Russell}, |
| year = {2026}, |
| howpublished = {Hugging Face Datasets}, |
| url = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/workingmem/legislation-cth} |
| } |
| ``` |
|
|
| Contact: contact@workingmem.ai |
|
|
