1 Definition
MetaLex stands for “Open XML Interchange Format for Legal and Legislative Resources”. CEN MetaLex standardizes the way in which sources of law and references to sources of law are to be represented in XML. It is the object of the CWA 15710:2010 reference document.
2 Objectives
· Enable public administrations to link legal information from various levels of authority and different countries and languages;
· Enable companies that are active in the field of legal knowledge systems to connect to and use legal content in their applications, which allows them to support a much larger market;
· Protect customers of such companies from vendor lock thanks to an open interchange;
· Help to improve transparency and accessibility of legal content for citizens and businesses.
3 Owner
MetaLex was developed by the CEN “Workshop on an Open XML Interchange Format for Legal and Legislative Resources”. It is hosted by CEN.
4 Intended audience
MetaLex was developed for public administrations, but also for citizens and businesses (linked with the improvement of the transparency and the accessibility), for companies that are active in the field of legal knowledge systems and their customers.
5 Long description
CEN MetaLex is an interchange format, a lowest common denominator for other standards, intended not to replace jurisdiction-specific standards and vendor-specific formats in the publications process but to impose a standardized view on legal documents for the purposes of information exchange and interoperability in the context of software development.
To meet these requirements, MetaLex defines a mechanism for schema extension, adding metadata, cross referencing, constructing compound documents and a basic naming convention.
MetaLex enables public administrations to link legal information from various levels of authority and different countries and languages and companies that are active in the field of legal knowledge systems to connect to and use legal content in their applications, which allows them to support a much larger market. The use of an open interchange protects customers of such companies from vendor lock in. Also the standard helps to improve transparency and accessibility of legal content for citizens and businesses.
MetaLex prescribes syntactic restrictions on XML documents and schemas, as defined by an XML Schema specification (section 3), defines a semantics for XML document metadata (section 4), defines a semantics for reference, citation, and document component inclusion (section 5), and defines MetaLex conformance of naming conventions (section 6). Conformance to this standard is defined inline, global conformance constraints are iterated in section 7 (Source: http://standards.cen.eu/dyn/www/f?p=204:110:0::::FSP_PROJECT,FSP_ORG_ID:34722,572598&cs=1E5875326D662855652211E5472C5F08D).
6 Known implementations
Dutch wetten.overheid.nl portal implements MetaLex. The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court implemented it as well.
7 How to participate
CEN has a web page dedicated to the workshop working on this topic, where it is possible to register for the workshop and download the business plan of it: http://www.cenorm.be/cenorm/businessdomains/businessdomains/isss/pm/ws+membership.asp
8 History / Key milestones
The CEN workshop on an Open XML interchange format for legal and legislative resources officially started on July 7 2006. The objective of the Workshop was to develop a CEN Workshop Agreement (CWA) on an Open XML interchange format for legal and legislative resources; The CWA was accepted by the CEN and associated standard organisations as a publicly available specification (PAS or pre-norm) for the period of three years, after which the agreement must be renewed or upgraded to a norm. In 2010, a new version of MetaLex was published.
(Source : http://www.metalex.eu/)
9 Additional documents
· Website of MetaLex: http://www.metalex.eu/