MetaLex

Info

Status

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. Once there is, it will be available through this website.

Open Standard

The MetaLex standard is an open standard, which means that although the intellectual property rights remain with the authors, the source can be distributed freely. The use of the standard, including the XML schema, DTD, and OWL schema, is free of legal restrictions. The MetaLex toolkit 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.

About the MetaLex website

On this site you can find:

• The MetaLex distribution zip file;
• Examples of various uses of MetaLex encoded files.
• Guidelines on the use of MetaLex XML;
• The Reference Guide for the MetaLex Schema files;
• Information about language support;
• Publications about MetaLex, and closely related subjects like legal content management, by the Leibniz Center for Law;

Features

The MetaLex standard has the following features:

• Multiple Languages
  The same content written down in one MetaLex document using multiple languages; Jurisdiction(/locale)-specific languages for MetaLex XML-tags.
• Version Management and Maintenance
  MetaLex uses a comprehensive way to determine the validity and activity of a part of legal text, using four attributes (date-enacted, date-repealed, date-publication, date-effective). This supports automatic generation of current and past versions of a legal text.
• Extensibility
  MetaLex supports mixing with other XML-based standards such as XHTML. MetaLex is ready for embedding in techniques for knowledge representation, code generation, rule generation and verification and validation techniques.
• Exchange
  MetaLex is a comprehensive format for exchange between different parties.
• Presentation
  MetaLex documents can be easily converted into different presentation formats, such as XHTML, PDF, RTF etc.
• Search and Filtering
  MetaLex facilitates search and filtering on legal documents.
• Overview
  MetaLex captures the relations between different (bodies of) legal sources. This gives insight into the structure of the law.

Components

The MetaLex standard consists of the following components:

• The Manual
  The MetaLex guidelines for encoding.
• The Schemas
  Standard schemas and schemas for Dutch legislation in the downloads section.
• The Stylesheets
  Stylesheets for transforming MetaLex documents to RDF, XSL:FO and (X)HTML and from Standard to Dutch, and stylesheets for transforming SDU BWB documents to MetaLex in the downloads section.
• The Tools
  Commandline tools, and the separately available Styler
• The Examples
  Examples of the use of MetaLex documents in the examples section.

Cooperation

MetaLex was developed in a cooperation between the following partners of the E-POWER consortium:

• Alexander Boer, Rinke Hoekstra and Radboud Winkels at the Leibniz Center for Law of the University of Amsterdam,
• Erwin Glassee and Frederik Willaert at Application Engineers, and
• Tom van Engers at the Dutch Tax and Customs Administration (now also Leibniz Center for Law).