FOLIO - Federated Open Legal Information Ontology

Creating and supporting open knowledge graphs for legal

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Date
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Creating and supporting open knowledge graphs for legal

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FOLIO - Federated Open Legal Information Ontology

FOLIO - Federated Open Legal Information Ontology

Why This Project Matters

”Garbage in, garbage out.”

This old adage is especially true of AI systems, where the quality and consistency of input data directly impacts the quality and reliability of outputs.

Unfortunately, while many organizations want to use cleaner, more consistent data, the cost of creating or coordinating has historically been prohibitive. This is especially true for smaller organizations or individuals, who tend not to have the knowledge management capabilities of larger organizations.

FOLIO addresses this challenge by creating a shared standard in the form of an open knowledge graph and supporting software resources. This standard is designed to be easy to use, easy to understand, and easy to contribute to, and the software resources are designed to maximize the impact and accessibility of the standard.

This knowledge graph provides a common framework for capturing, normalizing, and sharing legal data, as well as a ready-to-consume resource for developers of AI systems that use retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) techniques.

Resources

FOLIO provides free, open resources for developers and organizations of all sizes:

  • FOLIO Website — Learn about the standard, explore the ontology, and find documentation
  • FOLIO Public API — Free REST API with open CORS, Swagger docs at /docs, and multiple output formats (JSON-LD, OWL XML, Markdown, HTML)
  • folio-python — Python library for loading, searching, and querying the ontology (pip install folio-python)
  • folio-mcp — MCP server that makes the full ontology available to AI agents and coding assistants (uvx folio-mcp)
  • folio-api — Self-hostable API server with LLM-powered search, Docker support, and interactive explorer UI
  • FOLIO Ontology (GitHub) — The ontology source with 18,000+ concepts covering areas of law, document types, legal entities, and more

Get Involved

We’re looking for contributors to help guide, educate, build, and maintain with FOLIO resources.

Please visit the FOLIO website to learn more about how to get involved.

Contact us

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