CEN Workshop Activities

The CEN/ISSS workshop on an Open XML interchange format for legal and legislative resources

Note
The first workshop agreement was adopted at 6 december 2006.
Note
Go to the workshop page to learn more about the MetaLex/CEN prenorm.

Introduction

MetaLex is used as input to the CEN workshop on an Open XML interchange format for legal and legislative resources. The workshop officially started on July 7 2006. The objective of the Workshop is to develop a CEN Workshop Agreement (CWA) on an Open XML interchange format for legal and legislative resources; The CWA is accepted by the CEN and associated standard organisations as a publicly available specification (PAS or pre-norm) for the period of three years, after which the agreement must be renewed or upgraded to a norm.

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.

CEN has a web page dedicated to the workshop. You can use this page to register for the workshop. The business plan of the workshop can also be downloaded there.

Contacts

The chairman of the workshop is Prof. dr. Tom van Engers (vanengers@uva.nl), on behalf of the Leibniz Center for Law in the Netherlands. Vice chair is dott.ssa Caterina Lupo (lupo@cnipa.it), on behalf of the Centro Nazionale per Informatica nella Pubblica Amministrazione (CNIPA) in Italy. Secretary is Mr. Gertjan van den Akker (gertjan.vandenakker@nen.nl) of the NEN, the official standards body of the Netherlands.

The members of the technical subcommittee are Alexander Boer (aboer@uva.nl, of the Leibniz Center for Law), Fabio Vitali (fabio@cs.unibo.it, of the University of Bologna), and Balazs Ratài (balazs.ratai@carneades.hu, of Carneades Consulting).

Resources

The following technical resources related to the workshop are managed by the MetaLex website:

  • The workshop wiki page (further details about registration will follow soon): This is a so-called MediaWiki, also used by Wikipedia, and MediaWiki wikitext is very easy to use. Everybody can read the wiki. Only (representatives of) registered members of the workshop can write on the wiki. Please send an email to the members of the technical subcommittee to register. We have to manually compare the registration to the members list managed by the CEN. This may unfortunately take a number of days. Please add an explanation in your email if your employer is registered, but you register an account under an email address that cannot be traced to the employer.
  • The workshop subversion repository: Subversion (SVN) is a version management system. We recommend installing TortoiseSVN, a plugin for Windows Explorer, if you are new to SVN. Use this link to download the latest tarball of the contents of the repository if you don’t want to install any software for connecting to subversion repositories. Everyone has read-only access to the repository. Only members of the technical subcommittee have write access.

CEN Workshop

Links