On 23 June I took part in the TEGL Research Day at Maastricht University, in a session called “Globalisation Meets Digitalisation: Connected or Fragmented?”, organised by Valentina Golunova and Sarah Tas.
Rohan Nanda and I presented our current work jointly, alongside pitches from Pietro Mattioli and from Valentina Golunova and Sarah Tas, and the rest of the session went to questions from the room.
We brought the marine genetic resources work: the Hohfeld-structured knowledge base of treaty provisions, and what happens when large language models are asked to retrieve law from a field where the instruments do not agree with one another.
The session’s question turns out to be a pretty good one to put to this material. Marine genetic resources are about as connected as anything gets, since a sequence read off an organism travels anywhere a database can reach. The rules are the opposite: six instruments, drafted at different times for different purposes, that overlap in some places, collide in others, and leave gaps in the rest. Connected and fragmented at once, and the friction between the two is where the governance problem lives.
Henrique Marcos 