XML Documents Within a Legal Domain: Standards and Tools for the Italian Legislative Environment

Abstract

Abstract. The Norme in rete (NIR) [Legislation on the Net] national project aims at making easier the retrieval and the navigation between legal documents in a distributed environment and to encourage the development of systems with characteristics of interoperability and effective of use. In order to obtain this, two standards have been defined: a URN standard, to identify these materials through uniform names, and XML-DTDs to describe legislative documents within the NIR domain. In this paper the definition of such standards and the developments of tools aimed at making easier their adoption are illustrated. Particularly this paper presents a specific law drafting environment, NIREditor, able to produce legal documents and to handle legacy legislative documents according to the NIR standards.

A legal drafting environment based on formal and semantic XML standards

“…For these reasons we have decided to develop a drafting environment (Fig. 1) handling NIR documents in their XML native format [3] according to legislative technique rules. Similar initiatives exist at European level, as MetaLex [4], a knowledge management system for legislative drafting providing users with both content management and decision support components.…”

“…Four modules have been implemented: a) a Cross-Reference Parser, able to detect crossreferences and construct the URNs [3]; b) a Structure Parser, able to automate the NIR-XML conversion of legacy contents [3]; c) a Provision Automatic Classifier, which automatically classifies paragraphs into provisions according to the NIR provision model [3]; d) a Provision Argument Extractor, which automatically identifies the arguments of the provisions [1]. The first two modules detect the formal profile of a normative text, the last two detect the functional profile of it, producing its NIR-XML description.…”

“…The NIR project has established two official standards for normative documents: -a URN standard for cross-references, allowing references to be expressed unambiguously, in a stable way and independently of target document physical locations [3]; -a standard to represent normative documents, defined by three DTDs (NIR-DTDs) of increasing degree of complexity [8]. Basically NIR-DTDs describe normative documents by two kinds of elements: Structural elements and Metadata.…”

“…To this aim, NIR has established standards to represent normative documents and promoted the development of tools to make their adoption easier. The main one is NIREditor [3], a drafting environment for new and legacy normative documents. In Section 2 the NIR standards are introduced; in Section 3 the NIREditor main features are presented; in Section 4 the project of a module able to plan a new bill is discussed; in Section 5 some conclusions are reported.…”