The Wiki of the CEN/ISSS workshop on an Open XML interchange format for legal and legislative resources

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This is an ongoing discussion

The contents of this page should in no way be interpreted as the official opinion of the CEN workshop on an Open XML interchange format for legal and legislative resources.

About this Workshop

The CEN workshop on an Open XML interchange format for legal and legislative resources officially started on July 7 2006. The objective of the Workshop is to develop a CEN Workshop Agreement (CWA) on an Open XML interchange format for legal and legislative resources; The CWA is accepted by the CEN and associated standard organisations as a publicly available specification (PAS or pre-norm) for the period of three years, after which the agreement must be renewed or upgraded to a norm.

The discussions on this Wiki pertain only to the workshop, and not to the currently used version of the MetaLex schema. Everybody can read the wiki. Only registered members can write on the wiki. Only registrations by members of the workshop are accepted. We have to manually compare the registration to the members list managed by the CEN. This may unfortunately take a number of days. If your employer is registered, but you register an account under an email address that cannot be traced to the employer, then please send an email to one the members of the technical subcommittee to explain.

CEN has a web page dedicated to the workshop. You can use this page to register for the workshop and download the business plan of the workshop. See here.

The standard will enable public administrations to link legal information from various levels of authority and different countries and languages. Moreover, the standard will enable companies that are active in the field of legal knowledge systems to connect to and use legal content in their applications, which allows them to support a much larger market. An open interchange format will also protect customers of such companies from vendor lock in. Finally, the standard will help to improve transparency and accessibility of legal content for citizens and businesses.

Draft CEN/ISSS Workshop Agreement

The official first workshop agreement was published on the CEN website as CWA 15710.

The Workshop Agreement adopted on December 6 2006 is a local version of the XML interchange format for legal and legislative resources, reflecting the changes requested by the workshop in December 2006. It was made public on the 26th of January 2007. The action plan describes the subjects deferred to later updates. The Workshop Agreement proposal of November 15 2006 was submitted for workshop agreement in December 2006, and partially and conditionally adopted.

No workshop agreement was adopted in 2007. The 2008 proposal will be submitted for a vote, probably in september.

2008 Addendum

See the draft of the 2008 addendum in the subversion repository (download the pdf).

Additional activities, beyond the action plan, are intended, and some of the categories of legal documents and entities explicitly excluded in the current workshop agreement may be included in later activities.

2007 Addendum

See the draft of the 2007 addendum in the subversion repository (download the pdf). Comments on the draft sent to Alexander Boer will be pasted into the 2007 Addendum Discussion Page.

Additional activities, beyond the action plan, are intended, and some of the categories of legal documents and entities explicitly excluded in the current workshop agreement may be included in later activities.

Estrella Proposal

The Estrella project independently updated the 2006 proposal, taking into account some of the concerns voiced about the 2006 agreement. Read this document to learn more. Some of these proposals where adopted in the draft 2007 addendum.

Download

The results of the workshop are stored in the workshop subversion repository. Subversion (SVN) is a version management system. We recommend installing TortoiseSVN, a plugin for Windows Explorer, if you are new to SVN (Mac users can use SvnX). Everyone has read-only access to the repository. Only members of the technical subcommittee have write access.

Contacts

• The chairman of the workshop is Prof. dr. Tom van Engers (vanengers@uva.nl), on behalf of the Leibniz Center for Law in the Netherlands.
• Vice chair is dott.ssa Caterina Lupo (lupo@cnipa.it), on behalf of the Centro Nazionale per Informatica nella Pubblica Amministrazione (CNIPA) in Italy.
• Secretary is Mr. Gertjan van den Akker (gertjan.vandenakker@nen.nl) of the NEN, the official standards body of the Netherlands.

The members of the technical subcommittee are:

• Alexander Boer (aboer@uva.nl, of the Leibniz Center for Law),
• Fabio Vitali (fabio@cs.unibo.it, of the University of Bologna), and
• Balazs Ratài (balazs.ratai@carneades.hu, of Carneades Consulting).

Discussion Topics

• Scope statement: to which entities does the standard apply, and what aspects (and roles) of those entities are covered by the standard?
• Components of the standard: what materials are part of the Consortium Workshop Agreement?
• Definitions: Definitions of the terms used on this wiki and in the Consortium Workshop Agreement.
• Design Principles: General principles used in the technical realization of the standard.
• Modification and Consolidation: Discussion topic about modification of legislation, and the distinction between different consolidations in time of the same publication.
• Granularity: Discussion topic about the structure of legislation, and the function of that structure.
• Naming Convention: Discussion topic about the naming convention used for sources of law, their part, and consolidations of sources of law.
• Semantic references: Discussion topic about the semantic markup of references (i.e. the meaning of the text of the reference).
• Legal and legislative activities: Discussion topic about the use of a model of legal and legislative activities to organize and relate legal documents. This model should be specified in an OWL ontology.
• Case Law: Most discussion topics apply to legislation. Discuss here issues specific to case law.
• Relevant example standards: See this document.