MetaLex

Call for Participation: CEN/ISSS Workshop on an Open XML interchange format for legal documents

May 12th, 2006

The objective of the Workshop is to develop a CEN Workshop Agreement on an Open XML interchange format for legal documents.

The standard will enable public administrations to link legal information from various levels of authority and different countries and languages. Moreover, the standard will enable companies that are active in the field of legal knowledge systems to connect to and use legal content in their applications, which allows them to support a much larger market. An open interchange format will also protect customers of such companies from vendor lock in. Finally, the standard will help to improve transparency and accessibility of legal content for citizens and businesses.

The CEN Workshop Agreement will be based upon MetaLex. MetaLex is an open format and a generic and extensible framework for the XML and RDF encoding of the structure and contents of legal documents. It aims to be jurisdiction and language-neutral, and is based on modern publishing concepts like XSLT-based transformation pipelines and emerging Semantic Web standards like RDF and OWL.

Targeted participants will include representatives from legal publishers, public administrations, academia/research groups, and businesses in the area of legal content management.

The Workshop Kick-Off meeting will take place on 7 July 2006 in the CEN/CENELEC Meeting Centre in Brussels. The draft agenda of the Kick-Off meeting is available for download here.

The Workshop Chair will be elected at the Kick-Off meeting following an open nomination (candidatures to be sent to the CEN programme Manager, Luc Van den Berghe, by 10 June). The proposed chair of the CEN/ISSS Workshop Metalex is Prof. dr. Tom van Engers and the proposed Workshop Secretary is Mr. Gertjan van den Akker (NEN). This has to be confirmed at the Workshop Kick-Off meeting.

If you want for information, wish to participate in this Kick-Off meeting, or want to register for Workshop Membership, then go here.

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