Akoma Ntoso
Akoma Ntoso (Architecture for Knowledge-Oriented Management of African Normative Texts using Open Standards and Ontologies) is an international technical standard for representing executive, legislative and judiciary documents in a structured manner.
The term akoma ntoso also means "linked hearts" in the Akan language of West Africa. The usual acronym is AKN, to designate the XML AKN format.
History
Akoma Ntoso started as an UNDESA project within the “Strengthening Parliaments’ Information Systems in Africa” and later became the main work package of the activities of the LegalDocML Technical Committee within OASIS. The Akoma Ntoso XML schema standard “defines a ‘machine readable’ set of simple technology-neutral electronic representations (in XML format) of parliamentary, legislative and judiciary documents”.
Akoma Ntoso is constituted by an XML document schema providing sophisticated description possibilities for several Parliamentary document types (including bills, acts and parliamentary records, etc.). The work provided the basis for the OASIS Legal XML LegalDocumentML project.[1] The "United States Legislative Markup" (USLM) schema for the United States Code (the US codified laws) was designed to be consistent with Akoma Ntoso.[2] Akoma Ntoso was explicitly designed to be compliant with CEN Metalex,[3] one of the other de facto standards besides Akoma Ntoso,[4] which is used in the UK Statute Law Database.[5] The United States Library of Congress created the Markup of US Legislation in Akoma Ntoso challenge in July 2013 to create representations of selected US bills using the most recent Akoma Ntoso standard within a couple months for a $5000 prize,[6] and the Legislative XML Data Mapping challenge in September 2013 to produce a data map for US bill XML and UK bill XML to the most recent Akoma Ntoso schema within a couple months for a $10000 prize.[7]
Definition and aims
As official self-description, the standard
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(...) defines a set of simple, technology-neutral electronic representations of parliamentary, legislative and judiciary documents for e-services in a worldwide context and provides an enabling framework for the effective exchange of “machine readable” parliamentary, legislative and judiciary documents such as legislation, debate record, minutes, judgements, etc.
Providing access to primary legal materials, parliamentary works and judiciaries documents is not just a matter of giving physical or on-line access to them. “Open access” requires the information to be described and classified in a uniform and organized way so that content is structured into meaningful elements that can be read and understood by software applications, so that the content is made “machine readable” and more sophisticated applications than on-screen display are made possible.
See also
- LexML
- Legal informatics
- Parliamentary informatics
- LegalDocML (OASIS LegalDocumentML)
References
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