1. Towards a shared platform for legislative editors based on XML national standards T. Agnoloni, C. Biagioli, E. Francesconi, P. Spinosa, M. Taddei ITTIG-CNR Istituto di Teoria e Tecniche dell’Informazione Giuridica Workshop on "Legislative XML“ Klagenfurt – 16-18 November 2005 ITTIG - CNR

2. Overview NIREditor2 main features; Software architecture of NIREditor2; National vs. European legislative standards; ITTIG strategy to release a platform for the development of legislative editors implementing national standards; Conclusions.

3. NIREditor 2 On September 2005, the new version (v.2) of NIREditor has been released; On October 2005, it has been presented at the legislative officies of the two Chambers of the Italian Parliaments;

4. NIREditor features NIREditor is a specific editor for legislative documents based on NIR standards (DTD and URN); It is able to handle: –the structure (formal profile) and the semantics (functional profile) of a law text; –legacy contents according to NIR-DTDs using both manual and automatic facilities. It performs valid actions according to NIR-DTDs (no validation is necessary); Rules are obtained directly from the DTDs it can be adapted to different DTDs.

5. NIREditor features It allows to adhere to legal drafting rules as regards: –the structure (rules are contained in NIR DTDs); –the style (implemented at application level): Textual style of citations; Automatic numbering of divisions; Headings and closing formula; Dates management.

6. NIREditor modules Cross-Reference Parser Structure Parser Automatic Provision Classifier NIREditor Automatisms and manual facilities for drafting Structure managers Provision Arguments Extractor Semantics managers

7. New functions of NIREditor2 Automatic production of the “Testo a fronte” (comparision between two different versions of a document before and after chambers amendments); Automatic production of the text of the amendments; Spell-Check; Managing of: –Tables, ordered and unordered lists; –Attachments –Typografical features (bold, italics, underlining); –Superscripts and subscripts;

8. NIREditor new software architecture Software architecture organized into two levels: 1.Core generic platform to manage XML documents: Document management using DOM interface; Document visualization and export (html, pdf) using XSL stylesheets, XSL Transformer and XSL-FO; DTDRulesManager interface able to query a DTD, in order to: –Perfom only “valid” (in XML sense) actions, keeping the validity of a document at each step; –Suggest the allowed actions according to the cursor context; 2.Specific functions dealing with NIR standards: Ex: numbering of divisions insertion of partitions (“comma”, “articolo”, “sezione”, etc.); NIR-URN management.

9. NirEditorToolbar [OggettoDom]ActionImpl - enable toolbar buttons of the allowed actions according to the context - buttons listener and action performer [OggettoDomImpl] [FormImpl] activeNode NIR Document DOM Transactions Undo/Redo DTD queries Active Node Selection DTDRulesManager DocumentManager SelectionManager Text panes XML+XSL XML HTML javax.swing.text.html org.apache.xalan

10. Legal Standards and Editors Europen projects on legislative standards have to face the problem of having an editor implementing national standards; The most desirable perspective is to have an editor to be shared at European level; The matter of having an editor to be shared at European level is a matter of having a standard to be shared; Having a shared standard for legal documents, a core editor could be developed;

11. Towards European Legal Standards Standardization of legal information at the European level is desirable: –To improve the quality and accessibility of legal information in different legal systems across the EU; –Promoting the interoperability among applications and information systems managing legal information; –To provide high quality integrated services both for policy makers and for citizens;

12. National vs European Legal Standards Currently standards for legislation at national levels are being developed (NIR, MetaLex, LexDania, CHLexML); The definition of a European standard for legislation has to deal with: –Different legal systems (common/civil law) and legal histories; –Different legal drafting rules; –References; The definition of a European standard for legislation can take benefits from national best practices;

13. NIR Standards NIR-DTD standards have been defined according to a mechanism of DTD modules inclusions within the main DTD modules (strict, loose) (F. Megale and F. Vitali. I dtd dei documenti di norme in rete. Informatica e Diritto, 1:167– 231, 2001). Included DTD modules represent “building blocks” for derived DTDs; These “building blocks” can be seen as a core set of elements on whose basis NIR standards have been obtained;

14. NIR Standards Modules Inclusion Mechanism

15. LexDania Standards LexDania standard is an example of an object oriented legislative standard specification; It consists of three levels: –Meta Schema Define core data types (content encoding, addressing, metadata, structure (containers), and reference constructions). Building blocks for derived schemas –Omni Schema domain specific schema. Functional details common to a domain or area of the environment, such as metadata, titles, lists, tables, graphics, etc. –Application Schemas The specific schemas for a specific type of documents

16. LexDania Standards specification inheritance mechanisms Inheritance mechanisms to increment the semantics and details of the data types for each layer in LexDania schema systems; (Hugh Tucker, Lex Dania – White Paper “A System of XML Schemas for Danish Legislative Documentation”, 2004)

17. MetaLex Standard MetaLex standards are XMLSchema specified; It consists of: –MetalexRef.xsd XML elements needed to use references, citations and multiple languages within MetaLex documents; –MetalexStd.xsd Defines the XML elements needed to represent regulations. Imports the MetaLex reference schema.

18. MetaLex Standard features in the European standard specification perspective MetaLex standard supports multi-lingual documents in two distinct ways: Through localization of XML elements; By providing the means to maintain multiple language versions of the same document in one file ( xml:lang attribute); Localization is achieved by a language-specific schema extension in the standard document schema; This extension (ex. metalexStd_nl.xsd ) maps the element names to the names in a target language: <xsd:element name="regeling“ type="Regulation" substitutionGroup="Regulation"/> (see A.Boer R.Hoekstra R.Winkels, “METALex: Legislation in XML”, in Proceedings of Jurix 2002)

19. Multilingualism in MetaLex XSL Stylesheets can easily translate a standard specification to one language to another; The benefits: –users can tag text using their own language, whereas general tools need only to be aware of the English standard schema; Similarly, using specific XSL Stylesheets different language versions of the same document can be easily obtained ( xml:lang attribute);

20. Mid-term Perspective Definition of a Core European Legislative Standard as common denominator among different structures and semantics of legal documents; Development of a Core European Legislative Editor implementing such standards; Possible extensions at National level of the European standards should be arranged within the European standard framework, using an object-oriented policy; Similarly, National Legislative Editors should be obtained as object-oriented extensions of the Core European Legislative Editors;

21. Core European Legal Standards (URN XML DTD/Schema) Italian Legal Standards (URN, DTD/XMLSchema) Dutch Legal Standards (URN, DTD/XMLSchema) Danish Legal Standards (URN, DTD/XMLSchema ) … is_a spec Core Legislative Editor Art. 1 1. Freferfe 2. Fgjhhjjh jgjh ghjg Art. 1 1. Freferfe 2. Fgjhhjjh jgjh ghjg Kapitel. 1 1. Freferfe 2. Fgjhhjjh jgjh ghjg 1. 1. Freferfe 2. Fgjhhjjh jgjh ghjg … Law drafting environemnts for specific national standards instance_of Localization of the Italian standard instance_of Localization of the Dutch standard instance_of Localization of the Danish standard specific national standards … …

22. Short-term Perspective Waiting for a Core Legislative European Standard, ITTIG startegy consists in: –NIREditor consolidation (XML generic and NIR specific software layers); –Releasing the XML generic software layer as a platform on which developing editors implementing National legislative XML standards, allowing: Production of “valid” XML documents performing only “valid” actions; Configurable visualisation and exportation (html, pdf) using XSL stylesheets; Use of W3C standard interface to document management (DOM);

23. Software platform and exposed interfaces Java Platform to develop Legislative Editors XML generic layer Interface for specific filters to manage legacy contents Interface for functions implementing national standards NIR standards implementations National standards implementations NIR legacy contents managers National legacy contents managers Maintained by ITTIG-CNR Developed within National Projects

24. Why using this software platform instead of adapting a generic XML editor? Sharing a mechanism allowing an editor to perform only “valid” actions according to a specific national standard; Producing “valid” documents without a posteriori validation as in the general purpose XML editors –the Swedish project failed because of the production of documents with a posteriori validation (European Forum of Official Gazettes in Luxemburg); Configurable document visualizations and exportation in different formats (html, pdf) using only XSL stylesheets; Ease implementation of selective document views (using XSL as well);

25. Conclusions NIREditor2 has been presented; ITTIG strategy in the near feature: –releasing a core java platform allowing the development of editors implementing National legislative standards; It will be released according to a GNU/GPL license, and distributed (probably) on SourceForge.net Currently we are studying the possible interaction and adaptation of such platform to deal also with XMLSchema.