After two years of hard work, the OASIS LegalDocumentML (LegalDocML) Technical Committee is nearing the end of its formal standardization process for the Akoma Ntoso legislative data standard. As you may recall, Akoma Ntoso is an international parliamentary and legislative XML standard that enables the exchange of documents and data across legislative organizations. It was also the focus of the two Library of Congress Legislative Data Challenges last year.
OASIS has officially entered the public review process for the new Akomo Ntoso Version 1.0 Standard for Legislative Information draft documentation. The technical committee has released four draft specification documents for public review:
- Akoma Ntoso Version 1.0. Part 1: XML Vocabulary–Presents the main motivations, design principles, and benefits of the Akoma Ntoso vocabulary and approach.
- Akoma Ntoso Version 1.0. Part 2: Specifications–Documents the Akoma Ntoso XSD and DTD standard.
- Akoma Ntoso Naming Convention Version 1.0–Provides the naming convention for defining IRIs and ids related to the Akoma Ntoso XML standard.
- Akoma Ntoso Media Type Version 1.0–Contains the relevant information for the registration of the Akoma Ntoso media type (akn+xml) with the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA).
The public review process will remain open until June 5, 2015. The committee welcomes all comments, especially those from potential users and developers. OASIS membership is not required to submit feedback or comments.
In anticipation of the upcoming release of the standard, the George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, will host Summer School LEX 2015-US: Managing Legal Resources in the Semantic Web on July 27-31, 2015 with the First International Akoma Ntoso Conference (IANC) to follow on August 1, 2015. With offerings frequently limited to Europe, the LEX Summer School will cover many aspects of Akoma Ntoso including an overview of the use of legal XML standards to improve the accessibility and interoperability of legal resources, drafting methods, ontologies, natural language techniques for knowledge extraction, and document lifecycle workflows. The conference is intended to “encourage practitioners, public employees, academics, researchers and activists to contribute and share their experiences in searching, evaluating, adopting, adapting, providing tools and training personnel in using Akoma Ntoso for legal, legislative and other types of documents.” Organizers are currently assembling calls for papers (CFPs) and speakers for the conference. We’ll post more information as materials become available online.