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2 Overview (Non-Normative)

2.1 Objectives​

The LegalDocumentXML Specifications provide a common legal document standard for the specification of parliamentary, legislative, and judicial documents, for their interchange between institutions anywhere in the world, and for the creation of a common data and metadata model that allows experience, expertise, and tools to be shared and extended by all participating peers, courts, Parliaments, Assemblies, Congresses, and administrative branches of governments. The standard aims to provide a format for long-term storage of and access to parliamentary, legislative and judicial documents that allows search, interpretation, and visualization of documents.

The LegalDocumentXML Specifications aims to achieve the following objectives:

  • To create a common legal document standard for the interchange of parliamentary, legislative and judicial documents between institutions anywhere in the world.
  • To provide a format both for long-term storage and for access to parliamentary, legislative, and judicial documents that allows search, interpretation, and visualization of documents.
  • To create a common data and metadata model so that experience, expertise, and tools can be shared and extended by the participating peers - whether they be courts, Parliaments, Assemblies, Congresses or administrative branches of governments.
  • To create or reuse common mechanisms for naming and linking resources (URI) so that documents produced by Parliaments and Courts can be easily cited and cross-referenced by other Parliaments, Courts or individual users.
  • To be self-explanatory - that is, to be able to provide any information for its use and meaning through a simple examination of the schema and/or example documents, without the aid of specialized software.
  • To be extensible - that is, to allow modifications to the models within the Akoma Ntoso framework so that local customisation can be achieved without sacrificing interoperability with other systems.

The specifications of the standard are based on the experience of the Akoma Ntoso vocabulary as formalised in XML-schema. For this reason, the specification keeps the name "Akoma Ntoso" and the root of the XML-schema will be "akomaNtoso".

LegalDocML/Akoma Ntoso (hereafter referred to simply as Akoma Ntoso) is an open standard meant to make the structure and meaning of legal documents “machine readable.” The machine-readable descriptions of a document enable content managers to add meaning to the content and to describe the structure of the knowledge about that content. In this way, a computer can analyse information using processes similar to human deductive reasoning and inference, but in a massively faster way so that smart advanced services (such as point-in-time consolidation of legislation) can be achieved.

Making documents machine readable occurs via “markup.” Markup is the act of adding machine-readable annotation and labels to all the parts of a document in order to allow computer-based processing to be carried out (from publication to print to storage to technical analysis, etc.). In Akoma Ntoso, these annotations and labels consist of XML tags.

The next section describes the three main features that characterise Akoma Ntoso:

  • Descriptiveness;
  • Rich data models;
  • Separation of data and metadata.

2.2 Descriptiveness: everything has a name​

The Akoma Ntoso standard distinguishes between concepts regarding the description and identification of legal documents, their content, and the context in which they are used.

Names are used to associate the document representations to concepts so that documents can be “read/understood” by a machine, thus allowing sophisticated services that are impossible to attain with documents containing only typographical information, such as documents created in word-processing applications.

To make documents machine-readable, every part with a relevant meaning and role must have a “name” (or “tag”) that machines can read. The content is marked up as precisely as possible according to the legal analysis of the text. This requires precisely identifying the boundaries of the different text segments, providing an element name that best describes the text in each situation, and also providing a correct identifier to each labelled fragment.

Tag names, formally known as element names, are the basic vocabulary of the Akoma Ntoso language. The element name may be shared by many text fragments of a document and reveals their structural or semantic role. These include concepts such as preamble, section, paragraph, clause, reference, etc. In Akoma Ntoso there are almost 310 different element names to select from, covering a large majority of situations encountered in any legal document.

Besides the very specific names, Akoma Ntoso provides many generic names for those circumstances that are not precisely described by specific names. It is of fundamental importance to use generic elements only when no specific term is available in Akoma Ntoso.

2.3 Rich data models: ontologies​

In computer science, an ontology is a data model that represents concepts within a single domain and relationships between those concepts. Ontologies identify a number of classes of relevant concepts and the properties and the relationships between those classes.

Akoma Ntoso uses ontologies to relate facts and statements about the document and its content to concepts, things, individuals, and organizations that are mentioned within, but not necessarily stored within, the document being marked up.

For instance, the identification of a specific individual acting as a “Deputy Minister” in a “Parliamentary Debate” requires not only uniquely specifying the “name of the individual,” but also a mechanism to reliably associate the debate to that specific individual (as opposed to any other individual who might have the same name). This is done through ontologies that allow enriching documents, not just with metadata, but also with information that refers to clear, unambiguous and verifiable concepts.

The recording of information in this way also helps document the workflow and the process used to create the document.

2.4 Separation of data and metadata: editors vs. authors​

Akoma Ntoso makes an explicit and complete separation between the role of authors (who take the responsibility for the content in terms of sentences, words, and punctuation - e.g. sponsor of an act) and that of editors (who physically write the text on the mandate of the author - e.g. attorney - and decide and organize the final layout and publication of the document).

In the field of legal publishing, the concept of an author may be somewhat abstract (e.g., a legislator offering an amendment), whose content is the result of a formal action (e.g., a final vote of approval), while editors may intervene at all stages of the publication process.

In this regard, distinguishing between the content and an editorial addition is in many cases subtle and may be difficult to establish. A rule of thumb is to try to determine the state of the document at the moment it left the hands of the author and was taken in by the editors. For instance, even publication in an Official Gazette does not clearly establish the “official” content of a document. Some published data (such as the number of the gazette itself) was not decided upon by the official authors and as such should be considered metadata and not content.

Editors have two main tasks in the production process of Akoma Ntoso documents:

  • To identify and label (i.e., mark up) the pieces of the original content according to their role and structure;

  • To provide additional information about the document itself that is not contained in the official text as created by the original author.