Using XML as a means to access legislative documents: Italian and foreign experiences

Authors:
Andrea Marchetti;Fabrizio Megale;Enrico Seta;Fabio Vitali
Affiliations:
IAT-CNR;Camera dei Deputati;Camera dei Deputati;Università di Bologna e IAT-CNR
Venue:
ACM SIGAPP Applied Computing Review
Year:
2002

Citing 0
Cited 8

On original generation of structure in legal documents

ICAIL '03 Proceedings of the 9th international conference on Artificial intelligence and law
Introducing structure management in automatic reference resolution: An XML-based approach

Information Processing and Management: an International Journal
XDTD as a Simple Validation Language for XML-based Legal Documents

Proceedings of the 2009 conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems: JURIX 2009: The Twenty-Second Annual Conference
Improving the usability of standard schemas

Information Systems
Adapting specialized legal metadata to the digital environment: the code of federal regulations parallel table of authorities and rules

Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law
Examples of specialized legal metadata adapted to the digital environment, from the U.S. code of federal regulations

Proceedings of the 12th Annual International Digital Government Research Conference: Digital Government Innovation in Challenging Times
Semantic portal for legislative information

EGOV'06 Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Electronic Government
Data models for version management of legislative documents

Journal of Information Science

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

In this paper we describe the goals and the organisation of the ongoing project "Norme in Rete" (NIR --- http://www.normeinrete.it), which involves several important Italian institutions and organisations. This project aims at the production of tools for the access to Italian normative documents, and data formats for the standardisation of the text of laws and rules both national and local. One of its many goals is the conversion of the national law corpus into XML.Within the context of this project, our effort has concentrated on the development of an XML DTD already, and of an XML Schema very soon, to describe Italian national and local laws. We illustrate in this paper the overall structure of the DTDs. They are organised in a stricter, normative set of rules, with normative power, for new law drafts, and of a looser, descriptive set of rules for existing documents over which no rules can be imposed. In this paper we examine both types of DTD (strict and loose), their global organisation, the modules for legal elements, for textual and tabular tags (resembling HTML), and for modular, generic elements, that allow easy extendibility to the DTD. Also the treatment of meta-information is examined in this paper.We produce a short account of several analogous experiences in Northern Europe, carried out by both public institutions and private legal publishers. Mention is also made of the European Union's similar projects.