Call for Participation
JURIX 2003
International Workshop on the Development of Standards for Describing Legal Documents
11 December 2003, Utrecht, the
Netherlands
Organized in conjunction with JURIX 2003, the 16th Annual International Conference on Legal Information
Systems
Public administrations, enterprises and citizens are confronted with a growing quantity and complexity of rules, regulations and case law, from various sources at international, European, national, local and enterprise level. This development raises various issues regarding the manageability of these texts for both drafters and users.
Developing standards for the structure and content of (para)legal documents using techniques from ICT -- most notably XML and Semantic Web technologies -- may prove helpful in improving the access to, and development, quality and maintenance of these legal sources. On the other hand, the implementation and deployment of such standards within existing business processes and ICT facilities of organizations raises many issues of its own.
This workshop intends to provide a forum for end-users, researchers and developers from various organizations and backgrounds involved in this field: publishers, public administrations, legal practitioners, academics, software developers etc.
A list of downloadable presentations can be found here.
Workshop Location
The workshop was held in the "Academiegebouw" in Utrecht. A map of the site can be found here (Building no. 1).
Program
|
Time |
Activity |
|
9.30 |
Opening |
|
9.40 |
Caterina Lupo, CNIPA, co-ordinator Norme-in-Rete, Italy "Standard for legal documents : the Italian experience within the "Normeinrete" project" |
|
10.00 |
Harald Hoffmann, Metadat, Austria: "The electronic production and promulgation of legislative texts" |
|
10.20 |
Nina Kock, Ministry of Justice, Denmark: |
|
10.40 |
Small break |
|
10.50 |
Harm-Jan van Burg, Dutch Ministry of Finance/OASIS: |
|
11.10 |
Diederik Gerth van Wijk, Kluwer BV: |
|
11.30 |
Urs Paul Holenstein, Head of the Co-ordination Office for the Electronic Publication of Legal Data, Federal Office of Justice of Switzerland: "Application of modern information technology to facilitate access to Swiss law" |
|
11.45 |
Small break |
|
11.55 |
Thei Geurts, BeValue: |
|
12.10 |
C. Biagioli, E. Francesconi, P. Spinosa, M. Taddei: "The NIREditor: an XML specific environment for legislative drafting" |
|
12.20 |
General Discussion |
|
12.45 |
End |
Demonstrations
- The NIR-Editor: an XML specific environment for legislative drafting
- Be Informed (onder voorbehoud)
- Tool for automatic generation of transitional provisions
Abstracts
Caterina Lupo, CNIPA, co-ordinator Norme-in-Rete, Italy
"Standard for legal documents : the Italian experience within the
"Normeinrete" project"(pdf)
The project "Normeinrete" (i.e. "laws in the net"), promoted since 1999 by Italian National centre for information technology in Public administration (Centro nazionale per l'informatica nella Pubblica amministrazione - CNIPA) and ministry of Justice, aims to improve the accessibility to legislative and regulatory acts (laws, decrees, rules) by citizens and professionals through Internet, adopting a federative approach. . The project's main goals are to fulfill the citizens' right to acquire knowledge of norms and to support Public bodies in managing legislative documentation life-cycle efficiently. These objectives are pursued through the following actions:
- the implementation of a specialised portal, that offers search and retrieval functions on legislative documents published on different Public Administration's web sites;
- definitions coherent with internet standards to represent data and metadata meaningful in the legal domain, in order to improve effectiveness and interoperability;
- development and distribution of open source software to support legislative document management and publishing, according to standard data representation;
- training and knowledge sharing among Public administrations.
The project deals with the following issues:
- technology, regarding cooperative information systems: Normeinrete is one of the implementations based on Italian Nation-wide co-operative architecture.
- organisation, regarding the need to co-ordinate activities in which several autonomous entities are involved. Normeinrete has adopted a voluntary basis approach, that resembles co-operation within internet communities by encouraging knowledge sharing and open source software distribution through a dedicated virtual space.
- standardisation, regarding the definition of technical rules to improve data exchange and document life-cycle automation. Normeinrete has defined two standards based on internet-related technologies, such as eXtended Mark-up Language (XML) and Uniform Resource Names (URN).
- regulation, regarding promulgation of regulatory acts to achieve previously listed goals. Normeinrete standard definitions have been emanated as technical rules by CNIPA.
Harald Hoffmann, Metadat, Austria:
"The electronic production and promulgation of legislative texts"
From January 1 2004 all federal legislation in Austria will be electronically submitted to parliament and in the end authentically published in electronic version as well.
Nina Kock, Retsinformation (Ministry of Justice), Knud Erik Petersen (Danish
Parliament), Ole Lianee (CSC) and Hugh Tucker (Documenta)
"LexDania: An XML Meta-schema for Legislative Documents"(pdf)
LexDania is an XML meta-schema used to compose other, more specific, XML schemas. In this manner, it provides a data-model for Danish Legislative Documentation.
LexDania is a result of a project initiated by the Danish IT Ministry and carried
out in collaboration with the Retsinformation (Danish Ministry of Justice) and the Danish parliament.
The purpose of LexDania is to provide a common syntax and addressing scheme for the multitude of Danish
legislative document types. This data-model provides many advantages, such as being able to re-use components
which facilitates the writing of many schemas. It also makes the interchange of information easier between
schemas as well as providing a basis for interoperability.
The meta-schema LexDania is used as a set of "building blocks" and, at present,
consists of 5 XML schema modules: addressing, content, references, metadata, and structure. The data-model is
(similar to MetaLex) a three tiered structure: a) the meta-schema (LexDania), b) Omni-schemas (middleware) and c)
specific legislative schemas.
We have adopted a unique naming convention, the examples are mainly in Danish but they are described and all
documentation is in English.
We have also reached consensus on some XML "best practices" which we have enforced in designing the schemas, such as no mixed content and the use of elements contra attributes.
LexDania is still in the development stage and we are interested in discussions with others in this area.
Harm-Jan van Burg, Dutch Ministry of Finance
"XML standards in (and) tax"(pdf)
Harm Jan van Burg chairs the international OASIS Tax-xml technical Committee. He will present the goals and ambitions of this committee and why it is important for the tax community. Cooperation with standard setting bodies is relatively new for Governments but can have a big impact on the speed in which open standards get accepted. Standardisation is vital for the uptake of efficient e-government and for limiting development time and costs for new interactive services. The speaker will present his personal view on how these new services will and can evolve and how this can change relationships between businesses and governments.
Diederik Gerth van Wijk, Kluwer
BV
"What you see isn't what you got"(pdf)
Legal information is mainly textual information, but highly structured. The text one reads in a legal book is usually gathered by the author from several sources. In electronic delivery the reader might consider to rearrange these components, merge commentaries from several authors, and link it to his own documents. Legal publishing might shift from the delivery of precomposed texts to the delivery of freely recomposable text components. What kind of standards and tools should one need for such a way of publishing?
Head of the Co-ordination Office for the Electronic
Publication of Legal Data, Federal Office of Justice of Switzerland
"Application of modern information technology to facilitate access to
Swiss law"(pdf)
Switzerland has special problems in publishing and providing access to legislation. Under Art. 4 of the Constitution, Switzerland has four national languages: German, French, Italian and Romansh. It has 17 exclusively German-speaking cantons and part-cantons, four exclusively French-speaking and one Italian-speaking canton. In addition, there are three cantons where French and German are the two official languages, as well as one where three official languages coexist (German, Italian and Romansh). Swiss legal data are published in printed form and on the Internet at both federal and cantonal level.
The biggest problem: It follows from federalism that the 27 cantonal collections of texts of laws use their own classification system. This means that each collection can potentially use its own criteria for grouping and subdividing the main fields of law. The numerotation systems also differ. Some cantons give each legislative act a six-digit reference number, with or without an intermediate full stop, others add letters to digits, yet others have a continuous system of numbering from the first legal norm to the last one, etc.
Together with the Co-ordination Office for the electronic publication of legal data (Copiur), an initiative will be taken in 2004 to convince cantons of the necessity and usefulness of a unified system. As an initial step, a solution will be proposed which enables the cantons to adapt themselves as far as possible to unified prescriptions. The proposed solution does not require that cantons abandon their own operating, search or production systems, or renounce to their systems of classification of legislation.
The proposed solution will be to develop a data-model for Swiss Legislative Documentation, a common XML-Schema for federal and cantonal legislation.
Thei Geurts, BeValue
"The Knowledge Worker; the Next Frontier"(pdf)
A variety of legal knowledge workers is coping with the problem of information supply that doesn't take their individual context in account. That creates risks, like:
- Room for interpretation which effects the unity of policy and enforcement
- Loss of time and productivity
- Longer lead-times for decisions and customer services
- Uncertainty about the validity and actuality of information
Be Informed is a solution, in development by Be Value, that aims to bridge the gap between demand and supply side by starting from the demand side: the knowledge workers context.
Be Informed will service contextual delivery of digital content from multiple sources in order to support legal knowledge workers effectively in their active operations.
The challenges are i.a.:
- Conceiving a framework from the basic principle of the knowledge worker needs and behaviour
- Leveraging existing technologies and innovative conceptsAdapting to a wide range of content formats, Separating knowledge structuring from 'technical' configurationIntegrating content from different sources for multi-channel publishing
- Creating a generic framework that is flexible and robust enough to:
- deal with existing and emerging standards in the field of legal information and information services
- deal with existing and emerging knowledge solutions in the field of legal knowledge
- address all phases in the value chain from the make/buy, storage and maintenance phase to the use by heterogeneous end users
- be integrated in an operational platform as a background service or as a 'stand alone' service
A methodology is used to reach these goals.
C. Biagioli, E. Francesconi, P. Spinosa, M. Taddei
"The NIREditor: an XML specific environment for legislative drafting"(pdf)
This presentation present a specific law drafting environment, the NIREditor, able to produce legal documents according to the XML standards established within the national Project Norme in rete [Legislation on the Net] which aims at making the retrieval and the navigation between legal documents in a distributed environment easier. The main functions that help the user to apply such standards and the possible working situations are presented: the transformation of legacy law content into the XML-NIR standards as well as the composition and organization of new texts.
Downloadable Publications
- Introduction (pdf)
- Application of IT to facilitate access to Swiss law (pdf)
- NIR Editor (pdf)
- NIR Standard(pdf)
- LexDania (pdf)
- The Knowledge Worker; The Next Frontier (pdf)
- XML standards in (and) tax (pdf)
- What You See Isn't What You Got (pdf)
Organizers
|
Dr. Radboud Winkels |
Dr. Carlo Biagioli |
|
Leibniz Center for Law, UvA |
ITTIG-CNR |
|
Amsterdam, Netherlands |
Florence, Italy |
|
|
|
|
Murk Muller |
Dr. Tom Gordon |
|
Attorney at Law, Data Architect |
ECCO, Fraunhofer FOKUS |
|
Berlin, Germany |
Berlin, Germany |