Lexipedia - scalable legal engineering

Bridging the local BPMN software development team from SpiffWorks with the UVA School of Data Science capstone groups, and international legal engineers from LexDAO, the Center for Civic Innovation has hosted meetups and coordinated development on Lexipedia - the legal engineering wiki.

Using LLMs and ontological mappings to extract processes from data repositories like Charlottesville's legal code and converting them in to more auditable diagrams

Legal engineering in Charlottesville — making law more legible and accessible to everyone.

What is Lexipedia?

• A legal engineering platform being developed at the intersection of civic tech, open data, and AI — rooted in Charlottesville's tech and academic community

• Makes legal processes — business formation, contracts, compliance — understandable and navigable for individuals and small businesses without access to expensive legal counsel

• Treats law as structured data that can be queried, modeled, and automated — a discipline called legal engineering

Example: Starting a business in Charlottesville

The Charlottesville business (LLC) entity formation process is sample process that walks users from federal to state through to local business practices.

Lexipedia encodes this process as a BPMN workflow — a formal, executable model that can be run, analyzed, and translated into other systems:

BPMN process model — Charlottesville business formation

Ch. 14 (Licenses) · Ch. 34 (Zoning) · City of Charlottesville

Try the live Lexipedia demo

The BPMN model above runs as a real application at lexi-jbirddog.wasmer.app — walking users through entity type, registration, and licensing decisions step by step. No install, no login.

Launch demo →

• Walks a user through business formation — entity type, registration, licensing — using structured, plain-language guidance

• Runs as a lightweight web app deployable without heavy infrastructure (hosted on Wasmer, a WebAssembly cloud)

• Demonstrates how legal workflows can be encoded, shared, and iterated on as open civic tools — not locked behind professional services

• A proof-of-concept for how Charlottesville entrepreneurs — especially those without legal or financial resources — can self-serve foundational business decisions

From BPMN to executable & formal models

A BPMN model isn't just a diagram — it's structured data. Each element maps to constructs in other formal systems, unlocking verification, on-chain execution, graph analytics, and more. This is the core of Lexipedia's crosswalk architecture: one process, many representations.

Formal verification

Petri nets

• Tasks become transitions, flows become places

• Token semantics model concurrency and deadlock

• Reachability analysis proves all paths terminate

• Tools: CPN Tools, PIPE, LoLA model checker

On-chain execution

Solidity smart contracts

• Process states map to enum + state variable

• Gateways become require() guards

• Tasks become payable/external functions

• Immutable audit trail on EVM chains

Graph analytics

Neo4j / property graphs

• Tasks and gateways become labeled nodes

• Sequence flows become directed edges

• Cypher queries find bottlenecks and loops

• Cross-reference ordinance text as node props

Decision logic

DMN decision tables

• Each gateway becomes a decision table row

• Input columns: isHome, isSign, zoning type

• Output columns: required permits and links

• FEEL expressions replace opaque conditions

Workflow engine

SpiffWorkflow / Camunda

• BPMN XML runs directly — no translation needed

• User tasks render as web forms (JSON schema)

• Script tasks call APIs for license lookups

• Python-native engine for civic prototyping

Legal ontology

OWL / LKIF / LegalRuleML

• Ordinance sections become class hierarchies

• Permit requirements become SWRL rules

• Enables cross-jurisdiction comparison queries

• Bridges BPMN to computable law research

Why this matters for CCI's mission

• Equity: Legal complexity disproportionately burdens small businesses, sole proprietors, and underrepresented founders — Lexipedia lowers that barrier

• Local roots: Built in Charlottesville, tested on Virginia law, designed for the regional context CCI serves

• Replicability: The architecture can adapt to other civic legal domains — housing, employment, land use — areas where CCI already works

• Academic anchor: UVA SDS provides the research credibility and student talent pipeline to sustain and grow the work

Get involved

• Researchers & students: Collaborate on legal data modeling, NLP pipelines, and process automation

• Civic organizations: Partner to identify high-need legal workflow targets in the region

• Entrepreneurs: Try the tool, give feedback, help shape what gets built next