Standardisation organisation Oasis has started working on document standard for legal documents, it announced on 13 February. Oasis aims to approve Akoma Ntoso, 'a machine readable set of simple technology-neutral electronic representations of parliamentary, legislative and judiciary documents'.
Oasis latest 'Technical Committee' wants to promote a common legal document standard, 'creating a world-wide best practice that helps in the dissemination of the usage of XML within the parliaments' document management processes as well as the courts document management."
To extend and refine Akoma Ntoso, this TC is asking the participation of stakeholders that manage legislative and legal documents. Oasis aims this will start a community that will promote the standard, and that will help developers of tools and software applications by providing documentation and technical specifications.
Akomo Ntoso started being developed with funds from the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA) . The UN started working on XML schemas with parliaments in African countries. The second version of Akoma Ntoso was made public in November.
Closely related to the development of Akomo Ntoso is the open source XML editor Bungeni. It is based on OpenOffice and like Akomo Ntoso funded in part by UNDESA.
Akoma Ntosa is used by, for example, the Senate in Brazil and the European Parliament. Several other parliaments and public administrations in the EU are working on tools to help create and update legal texts. Some of them are considering to use both Bungeni and Akoma Ntoso.
More information:
Presentation on Akoma Ntoso to Oasis (pdf)
Akoma Ntoso
Bungeni
Earlier Joinup news item