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39-483: Akoma Ntoso ( A rchitecture for K nowledge- O riented M anagement of A frican N ormative T exts using O pen S tandards and O ntologies) is an international technical standard for representing executive , legislative and judiciary documents in a structured manner using a domain specific, legal XML vocabulary. The term akoma ntoso means "linked hearts" in the Akan language of West Africa and for this reason it

78-518: A CEN/CENELEC platform for the development of European Standards and other technical specifications across a wide range of sectors, also ensuring that standards correspond with any relevant EU legislation. CEN (together with CENELEC) owns the Keymark , a voluntary quality mark for products and services. A product bearing the Keymark demonstrates conformity to European Standards. On June 9, 2022, it

117-417: A coordination problem : it emerges from situations in which all parties realize mutual gains, but only by making mutually consistent decisions. Examples : Private standards are developed by private entities such as companies, non-governmental organizations or private sector multi-stakeholder initiatives, also referred to as multistakeholder governance . Not all technical standards are created equal. In

156-869: A European internal market for goods and services and to position Europe in the global economy. CEN is officially recognized as a European standards body by the European Union , European Free Trade Association and the United Kingdom ; the other official European standards bodies are the European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardization ( CENELEC ) and the European Telecommunications Standards Institute ( ETSI ). More than 60,000 technical experts as well as business federations, consumer and other societal interest organizations are involved in

195-544: A Working Group on Document Standards that approved in April 2017 to adopt Akoma Ntoso as standard for modeling its documentation. Akoma Ntoso in its version 1.0 is finally adopted as OASIS standard in the frame of LegalDocML in August 2018. As official self-description, the standard (...) defines a set of simple, technology-neutral electronic representations of parliamentary, legislative and judiciary documents for e-services in

234-509: A custom, convention, company product, corporate standard, and so forth that becomes generally accepted and dominant is often called a de facto standard. A technical standard may be developed privately or unilaterally, for example by a corporation, regulatory body, military, etc. Standards can also be developed by groups such as trade unions and trade associations. Standards organizations often have more diverse input and usually develop voluntary standards: these might become mandatory if adopted by

273-434: A government (i.e., through legislation ), business contract, etc. The standardization process may be by edict or may involve the formal consensus of technical experts. The primary types of technical standards are: Technical standards are defined as: Technical standards may exist as: When a geographically defined community must solve a community-wide coordination problem , it can adopt an existing standard or produce

312-417: A large set of both structural and semantic building blocks (over 500 entities in version 3.0) for representing this wide variety of document types of virtually all legal traditions. It is extensible in order to allow for modifications to address the individual criteria of organizations or unique aspects of various legal practices and languages without sacrificing interoperability with other systems. Akoma Ntoso

351-515: A large user base, doing some well established thing that between them is mutually incompatible. Establishing national/regional/international standards is one way of preventing or overcoming this problem. To further support this, the WTO Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT) Committee published the "Six Principles" guiding members in the development of international standards. The existence of a published standard does not imply that it

390-412: A new one. The main geographic levels are: National/Regional/International standards is one way of overcoming technical barriers in inter-local or inter-regional commerce caused by differences among technical regulations and standards developed independently and separately by each local, local standards organisation , or local company. Technical barriers arise when different groups come together, each with

429-621: A number of papers in relation to the proliferation of private food safety standards in the agri-food industry, mostly driven by standard harmonization under the multistakeholder governance of the Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI). With concerns around private standards and technical barriers to trade (TBT), and unable to adhere to the TBT Committee's Six Principles for the development of international standards because private standards are non-consensus,

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468-562: A single international standard ; ISO 9001 (quality), ISO 14001 (environment), ISO 45001 (occupational health and safety), ISO 27001 (information security) and ISO 22301 (business continuity). Another example of a sector working with a single international standard is ISO 13485 (medical devices), which is adopted by the International Medical Device Regulators Forum (IMDRF). In 2020, Fairtrade International , and in 2021, Programme for

507-402: A worldwide context and provides an enabling framework for the effective exchange of "machine readable" parliamentary, legislative and judiciary documents such as legislation, debate record, minutes, judgements, etc. Providing access to primary legal materials, parliamentary works and judiciaries documents is not just a matter of giving physical or on-line access to them. "Open access" requires

546-595: Is a public standards organization whose mission is to foster the economy of the European Single Market and the wider European continent in global trading, the welfare of European citizens and the environment by providing an efficient infrastructure to interested parties for the development, maintenance and distribution of coherent sets of standards and specifications. The CEN was founded in 1961. Its thirty-four national members work together to develop European Standards (ENs) in various sectors to build

585-404: Is always useful or correct. For example, if an item complies with a certain standard, there is not necessarily assurance that it is fit for any particular use. The people who use the item or service (engineers, trade unions, etc.) or specify it (building codes, government, industry, etc.) have the responsibility to consider the available standards, specify the correct one, enforce compliance, and use

624-494: Is as such part of a wider approach to developing open, non-proprietary technical standards for structuring legal documents and information under the name of Legal XML , which also includes formats and standards for, e.g., eContracts, eNotarization, electronic court filings, the technical representation of legal norms and rules ( LegalRuleML ) or technical standards for the interfaces of, e.g., litigant portal exchange platforms. Akoma Ntoso allows machine-driven processes to operate on

663-1011: The UK Statute Law Database . In 2012, the Akoma Ntoso specifications became the main working base for the activities of the LegalDocML Technical Committee within the LegalXML member section of OASIS . The "United States Legislative Markup" (USLM) schema for the United States Code (the US codified laws), developed in 2013, and the LexML Brasil XML schema for Brazilian legislative and judiciary documents, developed before, in 2008, were both designed to be consistent with Akoma Ntoso. The United States Library of Congress created

702-583: The WTO does not rule out the possibility that the actions of private standard-setting bodies may be subject to WTO law. BSI Group compared private food safety standards with "plugs and sockets", explaining the food sector is full of "confusion and complexity". Also, "the multiplicity of standards and assurance schemes has created a fragmented and inefficient supply chain structure imposing unnecessary costs on businesses that have no choice but to pass on to consumers". BSI provide examples of other sectors working with

741-564: The safety of workers and consumers , interoperability of networks, environmental protection , exploitation of research and development programmes, and public procurement . An example of harmonized standards are those for materials and products used in construction and listed under the Construction Products Directive . The CE mark is a declaration by the manufacturer that a product complies with all relevant EU directives . CEN (together with CENELEC) provide

780-552: The CEN network that reaches over 460 million people. CEN is the officially recognized standardization representative for sectors other than electrotechnical (CENELEC) and telecommunications (ETSI). On 12 February 1999, the European Parliament noted in a resolution that CEN, CENELEC and ETSI co-operate smoothly and that a merger of the three standardization bodies would not have clear advantages. The standardization bodies of

819-468: The Endorsement of Forest Certification (PEFC) issued position statements defending their use of private standards in response to reports from The Institute for Multi-Stakeholder Initiative Integrity (MSI Integrity) and Greenpeace. Private standards typically require a financial contribution in terms of an annual fee from the organizations who adopt the standard. Corporations are encouraged to join

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858-579: The German application profile "LegalDocML.de" in March 2020. The projects aim is to digitalize the entire legislative lifecycle from drafting to publication. Germany decided to adopt a model-driven development approach to creating and providing a subschema-based application profile in order to ensure interoperability among organizationally independent actors, each with their respective IT landscapes and tools. In this initial version LegalDocML.de covers draft bills in

897-688: The Markup of US Legislation in Akoma Ntoso challenge in July 2013 to create representations of selected US bills using the most recent Akoma Ntoso standard within a couple months for a $ 5000 prize, and the Legislative XML Data Mapping challenge in September 2013 to produce a data map for US bill XML and UK bill XML to the most recent Akoma Ntoso schema within a couple months for a $ 10000 prize. The National Archives of UK converted all

936-488: The basis for modern machine-readable and fully digital legislative and judicial processes. This is achieved by providing a coherent syntax and well-defined semantics to represent legal documents in a digital format. It is designed to be suitable as a common exchange format in all parliamentary, legal and judicial systems around the world. Taking advantage of the shared heritage present in all legal systems, Akoma Ntoso has been developed to have ample flexibility to respond to all

975-443: The board of governance of the standard owner which enables reciprocity. Meaning corporations have permission to exert influence over the requirements in the standard, and in return the same corporations promote the standards in their supply chains which generates revenue and profit for the standard owner. Financial incentives with private standards can result in a perverse incentive , where some private standards are created solely with

1014-461: The development of a technical standard, private standards adopt a non-consensus process in comparison to voluntary consensus standards. This is explained in the paper International standards and private standards . The International Trade Centre published a literature review series with technical papers on the impacts of private standards and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) published

1053-483: The differences in texts, languages, and legal practices. Aiming to expand on certain common practices, the standard therefore has a broad scope. It provides, inter alia, a common extensible model for data (the document content) and metadata (such as bibliographic information and annotations). Specifically, as a common legal document standard for the interchange of legal documents it is designed to be highly flexible in its support of documents and functionalities,12 maintaining

1092-459: The environment of the semantic web, it forms the basis for a heterogenous yet interoperable ecosystem, with which these tools can operate and communicate, as well as for future applications and use cases based on digital law or rule representation. Akoma Ntoso started as an UNDESA project in 2004 within the initiative "Strengthening Parliaments’ Information Systems in Africa" . Its core vocabulary

1131-516: The form of laws, regulations and general administrative directives. As part of an ongoing development process, the standard could incrementally be expanded in future stages to include all relevant document types of parliamentary, legislative and promulgation processes and tools. The High-Level Committee on Management (HLCM), part of the United Nations System Chief Executives Board for Coordination, set up

1170-486: The information to be described and classified in a uniform and organized way so that content is structured into meaningful elements that can be read and understood by software applications, so that the content is made "machine readable" and more sophisticated applications than on-screen display are made possible. Technical standard It is usually a formal document that establishes uniform engineering or technical criteria, methods, processes, and practices. In contrast,

1209-542: The intent of generating money. BRCGS, as scheme owner of private standards, was acquired in 2016 by LGC Ltd who were owned by private equity company Kohlberg Kravis Roberts . This acquisition triggered substantial increases in BRCGS annual fees. In 2019, LGC Ltd was sold to private equity companies Cinven and Astorg. European Committee for Standardization The European Committee for Standardization ( CEN , French : Comité Européen de Normalisation )

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1248-411: The item correctly. Validation of suitability is necessary. Standards often get reviewed, revised and updated on a regular basis. It is critical that the most current version of a published standard be used or referenced. The originator or standard writing body often has the current versions listed on its web site. In social sciences , including economics , a standard is useful if it is a solution to

1287-607: The legislation in AKN in 2014. The availability of bulk legislation "moved the UK's ranking from fourth to first, in the 2014 Global Open Data Index, for legislation". The Senate of Italian Republic provides, since July 2016, all the bills in Akoma Ntoso as bulk in open data repository. The German Federal Ministry of the Interior started the project Elektronische Gesetzgebung ("Electronic Legislation") in 2015/2016 and published Version 1.0 of

1326-402: The production and the management of legislative amendments. Thanks to this project, the application of Akoma Ntoso could be extended to new type of documents (e.g. legislative proposal, transcript) and to other scenarios (e.g., multilingual translation process). Akoma Ntoso also was explicitly designed to be compliant with CEN Metalex, one of the other popular legal standards, which is used in

1365-421: The syntactic and semantic components of digital parliamentary, judicial and legislative documents, thus facilitating the development of high-quality information resources. It can substantially enhance the performance, accountability, quality and openness of parliamentary and legislative operations based on best practices and guidance through machine-assisted drafting and machine-assisted (legal) analysis. Embedded in

1404-676: The thirty national members represent the twenty seven member states of the European Union, three countries of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA), the United Kingdom and other countries that are highly integrated into the European economy . CEN is contributing to the objectives of the European Union and European Economic Area with technical standards (EN standards) which promote free trade ,

1443-498: Was announced that ASTM International and CEN have agreed to extend and expand a Technical Cooperation Agreement from 2019. The current CEN Members are: The current affiliates are Albania , Armenia , Azerbaijan , Belarus , Bosnia and Herzegovina , Egypt , Georgia , Israel , Jordan , Lebanon , Moldova , Montenegro , Morocco , Tunisia and Ukraine . The current partner standardization bodies are Australia , Canada , Mongolia , and Kazakhstan . The Vienna Agreement

1482-659: Was created mostly by two professors from the Centre for Research in the History, Philosophy, and Sociology of Law and in Computer Science and Law (CIRSFID) of the University of Bologna . A first legislative text editor supporting Akoma Ntoso was developed in 2007 on the base of OpenOffice . In 2010 European Parliament developed an open source web-based application called AT4AM based on Akoma Ntoso for facilitating

1521-514: Was selected for nominating this legal XML standard. The usual acronym is AKN , to designate the XML AKN format . The Akoma Ntoso standard defines a set of ‘machine readable’ electronic representations in XML format of the building blocks of parliamentary, legislative and judiciary documents". The standard is composed of : Akoma Ntoso is an international legal document standard that serves as

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