Note
The MetaLex 1.3 schema is still being maintained to support the existing user base. New users should instead see whether the new
MetaLex/CEN workshop agreement (CWA) meets their requirements. There is no comparable distribution of utilities for the CWA yet.
This page lists the files released by the MetaLex development team (see the menu on the left). The stable versions are released separately as zip files:
The most recent, experimental version of the MetaLex distribution can be found in the Leibniz Center for Law SVN repository:
The use of the standard, including the XML schema, DTD, and OWL schema, is free of legal restrictions. The MetaLex toolkit distribution available for download on this website is covered by the Lesser General Public License. This license places copyright restrictions on the toolkit itself but does not apply these restrictions to other software that merely links with data or code in the toolkit.
Note that some of the tools offered for separate download on this page are covered by the GPL, because they use libraries covered by the GPL.
Legal Atlas is a tool for viewing both spatial regulations and the associated geospatial information in the form of maps. It is a showcase of how MetaLex integration with existing standards, such as GML and OWL, can result in robust and feature-rich knowledge management solutions. Please read the included license.
Legal Atlas is being developed within the project Digitale Uitwisseling Ruimtelijke Plannen (DURP; digital exchange of spatial plans), initiated by the Dutch government. Legal Atlas enables dynamic references between spatial regulations (encoded in MetaLex format) and the associated geospatial information. This information is encoded using IMRO2006, the Dutch government standard for XML exchange of spatial plans. It is compatible with GML 3.1.
References between texts and plans are resolved via SPARQL queries on OWL models of both the regulation and the relevant geospatial information. These models are included in the distribution.
The current 0.9b version is in BETA stage, but is still under development. Please read the user guide provided below. Legal Atlas has been tested to work under Windows XP and Java 1.5. Older versions of Java will probably cause problems. Legal Atlas is an open source application, and depends on the OpenJUMP GIS application (licensed under GPL), and the Jena SemanticWeb framework.
Please visit the LegalAtlas download repository at:
http://relay.leibnizcenter.org/ (login: public, pass: public)
Continue Reading March 30th, 2007
Legal Atlas is a tool for viewing both spatial regulations and the associated geospatial information in the form of maps. It is a showcase of how MetaLex integration with existing standards, such as GML and OWL, can result in robust and feature-rich knowledge management solutions. Please read the included license.
Legal Atlas is being developed within the project Digitale Uitwisseling Ruimtelijke Plannen (DURP; digital exchange of spatial plans), initiated by the Dutch government. Legal Atlas enables dynamic references between spatial regulations (encoded in MetaLex format) and the associated geospatial information. This information is encoded using IMRO2006, the Dutch government standard for XML exchange of spatial plans. It is compatible with GML 3.1.
References between texts and plans are resolved via SPARQL queries on OWL models of both the regulation and the relevant geospatial information. These models are included in the distribution.
The current 0.11a version is in alpha stage, has severely limited functionality, has not been extensively tested, and is still under heavy development. Please read the user guide provided below. Legal Atlas has been tested to work under Windows XP and Java 1.5. Older versions of Java will probably cause problems. Legal Atlas is an open source application, and depends on the OpenJUMP GIS application (licensed under GPL), and the Jena SemanticWeb framework.
Please visit the LegalAtlas download repository at http://draco.leibnizcenter.org/relay (login: public, pass: public)
Continue Reading August 11th, 2006
Please visit the MetaLex download repository at http://draco.leibnizcenter.org/relay (login: public, pass:public)for a MetaLex configuration of the open source editor Jaxe. Read the instructions for installation. Jaxe is covered by the GPL license, and cannot be used in combination with closed-source products.
The editor uses a special simplified version of the MetaLex schema. The following changes were made in the process of adapting the MetaLex schema to Jaxe:
- It is no longer possible to use ##any elements in TextType. In practice this means that elements like Sentence, Title, Introduction, etc. that typically take TextVersion elements now can only accept the
(TextVersion+,Annotation+,MetaData+) pattern.
- Elements of AReferringTextType now take elements from
##any, and no longer accept TextVersion subelements. Quote is an exception.
- Fixed a little incompleteness that caused problems in Jaxe: added
mixed=true in the definition of the contents of Annotation.
The most obvious incompatibility with the existing MetaLex example corpus is that Index elements now must contain a TextVersion. The biggest problem in editing is that the editor cannot deduce from the schema what kinds of elements are appropriate to use in free text inside TextVersion elements.
There is also an experimental MetaLex plugin for Vex, a Visual Editor for XML covered by the LGPL, in the MetaLex download repository at http://draco.leibnizcenter.org/relay (login: public, pass:public). Vex is an Eclipse plugin and has a wordprocessor-like interface. The plugin supports only a subset of MetaLex. Note that Vex is unfortunately incompatible with certain other Eclipse plugins, notably Topbraid Composer. We therefore recommend using the pre-configured Vex installation linked from the Vex website.
Continue Reading June 30th, 2006
MetalexStyler 0.1a is a convenience tool for applying the stylesheets from the MetaLex distribution to your MetaLex files. Please read the included license and release notes (license.txt, release-notes.txt).
MetalexStyler 0.1a is Alpha software, it has not been thoroughly tested, and is limited in functionality. It has been developed using Java 1.5.0 but should probably run fine under 1.4.x as well.
Please keep this in mind when using the software.
You can use the styler to easily perform XSL stylesheet transformations on MetaLex sources (or any other XML file).
IMPORTANT: Please make the proper adjustments to the MetalexStyler.properties file (use Notepad or any other plain text-editor), and ensure that both the sourcePanel.path and stylePanel.path are set correctly.
Please visit the MetaLex download repository at http://draco.leibnizcenter.org/relay (login: public, pass:public)
Continue Reading June 28th, 2006
Filename:
Description:
- General update release of MetaLex.
Changes since previous release:
- Four attribute groups have been added: identity attributes, descriptor attributes, temporal attributes, extended temporal attributes. All are optional.
- Several elements have been added: JudicialDecision, AdministrativeDecision, InformalPart, Metadata.
- Translations of the new elements have been added to the Dutch vocabulary. There is now also an incomplete Hungarian vocabulary.
- There is a new translation of metalex into OWL.
- Several bugs involving import statements have been fixed. Note that some versions of some validators may still complain about the import statement for XML. This statement is non-essential for the schema, and can be changed in order to suppress a warning in your validator of choice. See the comment in the schema files.
- We have put some thought into the use of URI and URN resolvers, resulting in some small changes in the interpretation of attributes, and the addition of some new ones in the aforementioned attribute groups.
- Metalex now really supports XLink.
- All types in the schema have been renamed: we added the suffix _Type to distinguish the type names from the element names.
Please visit the MetaLex download repository at http://draco.leibnizcenter.org/relay (login: public, pass:public) and download /MetaLex /metalex-v1.3.zip
Continue Reading June 1st, 2006
