AT4AM for All is the free / open source release of AT4AM, the web-based amendment authoring tool used at the European Parliament.
AT4AM
AT4AM is the web-based amendment authoring tool used with great success at the European Parliament since February 2010 by Members and their assistants, and advisors of the political groups to create and table amendments on the proposals of the European Commission and the Council of the European Union, and the reports of the parliamentary committees.
AT4AM is the first system of the future XML-based workflow of amendments at the European Parliament.
Compared to the previous Word-based system, the great benefits of AT4AM are a much better quality of the amendments, and an easier and faster process of creating, sharing, tabling, registering, ordering and verifying amendments focused on content and no more on formatting.
Until February 2013, 250.000 amendments were created with AT4AM.
AT4AM for All
The European Parliament decided to use the knowledge and the experience gained on the AT4AM project to develop AT4AM for All primarily to help national and regional parliaments to implement there own XML-based amendment authoring systems.
AT4AM for All is a framework developed with Java technologies, and in particular with Google Web Toolkit (GWT).
Native Akoma Ntoso XML support
AT4AM for All uses Akoma Ntoso XML format as input format for source texts and as output format for amendments.
Akoma Ntoso ("linked hearts" in Akan language of West Africa; www.akomantoso.org) defines a "machine readable" set of simple technology-neutral electronic representations (in XML format) of parliamentary, legislative and judiciary documents.
Akoma Ntoso is an initiative of "Africa i-Parliament Action Plan" (www.parliaments.info) a programme of United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN/DESA; www.un.org/esa/desa/).
It is used by the European Parliament, the European Commission, the United Nations and the Italian Senate.