Africa is the first continent to promote a common open standard for parliamentary, legislative and judiciary documents, turning its position from a latecomer to a world leader, and a model for the rest of the world. Akoma Ntoso flexibility and adaptability has been proved by the fact that it has been adopted as one of the main references for their own XML schema by the LexML Brazil and, after the vetting from the Engineering, Methods and Solutions Service of the European Parliament, also adopted by the European Parliament as standard for its XML legislative documents.

This is a major release of Akoma Ntoso and it is the end point of a long list of intermediate “sub-releases” taking into account input from many different sources, the most noticeable the requirements collected during the workshop “Localising Akoma Ntoso Workshop” that was held from the 25-26th of January 2011 in Cape Town and hosted by the Parliament of South Africa in collaboration with Office for Promotion of Parliamentary Democracy of the European Parliament. The workshops provided the opportunity to gather and discuss the requirements from 16 national, regional and continental assemblies and the inputs of the European Parliament.

This release contains a several adjustments to address the new requirements, a new specification of the Naming Convention to fully align it to the CEN Metalex requirements, a new approach to renumbering and the co-existence of similarly numbered text fragments.

Given the number and range of the differences, it was felt that a new version number was required, for this reason this version of Akoma Ntoso has been called 2.0.

You can find the full version of the Release Notes here and the actual schema here