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The LegalDocumentML (LegalDocML) Technical Committee (TC), set up “to promote a common legal document standard (based on Akoma Ntoso) that promotes world-wide best practices for the use of XML” to deal with parliamentary, legislative and judiciary documents, held its first meeting last 30 March.

The LegalDocumentML (LegalDocML) Technical Committee (TC), set up “to promote a common legal document standard (based on Akoma Ntoso) that promotes world-wide best practices for the use of XML” to deal with parliamentary, legislative and judiciary documents, held its first meeting last 30 March. 

More than 20 attendees called in to take part in the first gathering of this virtual forum, marking an impressively broad participation, with representatives from Africa, South America, Europe and North America from parliaments, universities and industry.

 

Such a world-wide attendance gives even more strength to this initiative, whose aim is to collect requirements from the community of the stakeholders who create, manage and use legislative and legal documents (editors, libraries, public institutions, tribunals, publishers, etc.), ensuring that the needs of each region are met. 

 

The output of such exercise will be a common legal document standard based on Akoma Ntoso, thus advancing world-wide best practices for the use of XML within parliaments' document management processes, courts’ judgment management systems, and generally in legal documents, including contracts.

 

The first meeting was dedicated mainly to procedural issues and to the election of the officials. Prof. Monica Palmirani and Prof. Fabio Vitali of the University of Bologna were elected Chairs and Mr. Tom Bruce, Cornell Law School, Legal Information Institute, Mr. Claudio Fabiani, European Parliament, Ms. Sylvia Tosar Piaggio, Parlamento del Uruguay and our own Mr. Ashok Hariharan, Africa i-Parliaments Action Plan (UN/DESA) were elected Secretaries while Mr. Roger Sperberg of LexisNexis as Document Quality Manager.

 

Interested stakeholders can still join this exercise and take active part in defining the standardized format which, used within a well-controlled workflow, will certainly contribute to improving the operations of parliaments and courts, promoting innovation, transparency, assessment, and efficacy in the use of legal information.

 

The list of deliverables that the TC could/should be working at was also proposed and discussions will continue in the next meeting. The list of deliverable tentatively will be:

  • language primer: a layman introduction to all the issues relevant to the language (Non Normative);
  • language vocabulary: an introduction to the themes, the design issues and the objectives of the language followed by the systematic discussion of the characteristics of each element of the language (Normative);
  • language schema: the formal structure (in XSD and/or RelaxNG) of the XML vocabulary of the language (Normative);
  • naming convention: the structure and components of the URI used in the language (Normative);
  • pilot cases: a list of good experiences and best practices of applying the language to real life situations;
  • user manual: instructional material for producers of documents, explaining the steps and the aspects of the actual production of documents using the language.

For further information, please click on the following links:
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=legaldocml
http://xml.gov/stratml/carmel/LDTCwStyle.xml
http://www.akomantoso.org/
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