MetaLex

New features in release 1.3

1. Support for administrative and judicial decisions.
2. Support for the Hungarian language.
3. Additional requirements for establishing the identity of legal sources.
4. Expanded support for retroactive and delayed applicability.
5. Support for geospatial references to the area of applicability of a legal source, and for references to legislators, legislative powers, and legislative procedures.
6. Increased integration with the Web Ontology Language (OWL).
7. Metadata and third-party annotations are now distinguished.
8. Added dutch examples from the Basis Wetten Bestand (BWB).
9. Added European Community examples (EC).

Backwards compatibility

There are five small changes that may result in existing metalex documents being no longer compliant with the metalex standard:

1. The RDF version of metalex has changed completely. Please see the new OWL schema, and the XSL transformation.
2. Cite and Reference tags must have a xlink:type attribute. By adding this attribute, metalex is completely compliant with the XLink standard. If you cannot resolve the target of the Cite or Reference, set for instance xlink:type="simple". This change is easy to accomodate with a search and replace operation in your metalex documents.
3. If you use the id attribute to establish local identity of an element, it must be possible to establish the XML base (global identity). This is trivially achieved by putting the documents on the world wide web. Note that if you do that, you fix the identity to a specific location on Internet. It is however recommended to use the xml:base attribute, in case the document is copied from the world wide web.
4. The attribute date-ref has been renamed to date-reference. This change is easy to accomodate with a search and replace operation in your metalex documents.
5. The metalex.xsd file no longer contains language-specific vocabularies. If you used the Dutch vocabulary, and a xsi:schemaLocation attribute pointing to metalex.xsd, you will have to change this reference to the appropriate schema in the subdirectory nl. This change is easy to accomodate with a search and replace operation in your metalex documents.

Changes from previous release

1. Four attribute groups have been added: identity attributes, descriptor attributes, temporal attributes, extended temporal attributes. All are optional.
2. Several elements have been added: JudicialDecision, AdministrativeDecision, InformalPart, Metadata.
3. Translations of the new elements have been added to the Dutch vocabulary. There is now also an incomplete Hungarian vocabulary.
4. There is a new translation of metalex into OWL.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. Metalex now really supports XLink.
8. All types in the schema have been renamed: we added the suffix _Type to distinguish the type names from the element names.