In the meantime, the MetaLex examples from the examples section have been loaded into the repository and can be queried either through the SPARQL/SeRQL endpoint of Sesame, or through a web-interface. We are planning to extend these services with faceted browsing, as provided by e.g. Longwell.

Endpoint :
http://draco.leibnizcenter.org:8180/openrdf-sesame
Repository:
metalex

Note that this paper is about the MetaLex CEN prenorm, and not about MetaLex 1.3, its predecessor. A general remark about this confusion: MetaLex 1.3.* is still used by some important users, while MetaLex CEN is still premature. As soon as we have a more complete CEN agreement, and - very importantly - have reimplemented basic support functionality like the XSL-FO stylesheets for the CEN standard, this website will be reorganized. The MetaLex 1.3 schema will no longer be changed, except maybe for minor bug patching. Some tools that use MetaLex 1.3 are however still under development.

Position papers of up to 2 pages on aspects relating to the following subjects are very welcome:

1. Unique identification of (parts of) sources of law, URI’s and URN’s, meaningful identifiers versus meaningless
2. Lowest grain size of identifiable elements in sources of law, what are principles or heuristics for determining a sensible grain size level
3. What set of metadata should be part of such an interchange format
4. How to link (external) models or interpretations of the meaning of sources of law to the original sources
5. Conceptualization of the domain of legislating and legislation, i.e. an ontology of the task of legal drafting and its products

Please send two page position papers, preferably in PDF format, by email to winkels@uva.nl. The deadline for submission of position papers: 23rd November 2007.

The Bridge, a magazine of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering directed to the general audience, recently published a special issue reflecting on voting technologies (volume 37, number 2, summer 2007) that may be of interest to concerned citizens and politicians.

The LeX school is an intensive, 6-day program aimed at providing knowledge of the most significant ICT standards emerging for legislation, an understanding of their impact in the different phases of the legislative process, awareness of the tools based on legislative standards, and the ability to participate in the preparation and use of standard-compliant documents throughout the participate in law-making process.

Presentation slides are available here. Other materials can be found here. Some of the presentations discuss MetaLex.

The LeX school is an intensive, 6-day program aimed at providing knowledge of the most significant ICT standards emerging for legislation, an understanding of their impact in the different phases of the legislative process, awareness of the tools based on legislative standards, and the ability to participate in the preparation and use of standard-compliant documents throughout the participate in law-making process.

The LeX school will address standards concerning different aspects of legislation: abstract (logical) ways of identifying legislative documents, ways of structuring legislative documents and data, ways of dealing with changes in the law, ways of distinguishing and representing the different stages of the life cycle of a law text (from first drafts, to parliamentary discussions, to amendments, to subsequent modifications), ways of defining and applying conceptual classifications to law texts, ways of building executable representations of legislative knowledge.

Organising institutions: CIRSFID (University of Bologna), European University Institute, University of Amsterdam, and ITTIG-CNR (Florence).

Directors: Enrico Pattaro and Giovanni Sartor

Program committee: Tom van Engers, Monica Palmirani, Giovanni Sartor

Scientific committee: Carlo Biagioli, Alexander Boer, Gladys Boss Sholley, Raffaella Brighi, Angelo di Iorio, Enrico Francesconi, Tom Gordon, Caterina Lupo, Pierluigi Spinosa, Daniela Tiscornia, Radboud Winkels, Flavio Zeni

Contact for information: legislativexml@eui.eu

Web site (including the detailed program and link to the application form): http://www.one-lex.eu/Activities/summerschool/legislativexml.html

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)