Search

This paper presents the application of the Akoma Ntoso XML standard to the Swiss Federal Chancellery, in particular to the Official Publications Centre document workflow in relation of the IRIs/URIs naming convention. A robust proof-of-concept was conducted on a variety of document types and a IRIs/URIs resolver was implemented for managing the dereferencing to the official sources.

Il presente contributo ripercorre le tappe fondamentali della nascita dell’informatica giuridica all’interno dell’Università di Bologna e conseguentemente anche le fasi evolutive del CIRSFID che si è fatto promotore di questa disciplina a livello locale, nazionale ed internazionale. La narrazione fonda le sue radici su due fonti storiche: i) documenti di archivio reperiti presso l’Ateneo di Bologna, che documentano le tappe istituzionali della nascita del centro di ricerca e fotografano così le iniziative da questo avviate per favorire a livello accademico il radicarsi dell’informatica giuridica come insegnamento universitario; ii) numerose interviste al fondatore del CIRSFID, prof. Enrico Pattaro, e al prof. Giovanni Sartor per colmare con il racconto le lacune che i documenti non ricostruiscono e arricchire così la narrazione con elementi aneddotici. Dopo l’excursus storico il contributo sposta l’attenzione al presente, tratteggiando la metodologia, le caratteristiche e le attività dell’informatica giuridica bolognese quali l’interdisciplinarietà, l’internazionalizzazione e l’applicazione concreta degli studi teorici. Infine si tratteggia il futuro dell’informatica giuridica come disciplina che, utilizzando il metodo filosofico analitico, favorisce l’introduzione nella società delle nuove tecnologie, attuali e futuribili, nella loro massima potenzialità e nel rispetto dei principi e dei valori giuridici ed etici.

This abstract presents RAWE, a Web editor for helping the legal knowledge engineer marking up legal document’s using the Akoma Ntoso [2][13] XML standard, and also to model legal rules using a logic formalism and convert them into Legal RuleML [1][11].

In the last few years University of Turin and CIRSFID University of Bologna collaborated to pair NLP techniques and legal knowledge to detect modicatory provisions in normative texts. Annotating these modications is a relevant interesting problem, in that modications aect the whole normative system; and legal language, though more regular than unrestricted language, is sometimes particularly convoluted, and poses specic linguistic issues. This paper focuses on two major aspects. First, we explore a combination between parsing and regular expressions; to the best of our knowledge, such hybrid strategy has never been proposed before to tackle the problem at hand. Secondly, we signicantly extend past works coverage (basically focussed on substitution, integration and repeal modications) in order to account for further twelve modication kinds. For the sake of conciseness, we fully illustrate and discuss only few modication types that are more relevant and interesting: suspension, prorogation of ecacy, postponement of ecacy and exception/derogation. These sorts of modi- cations appear particularly challenging, in that modications in these categories make use of similar linguistic speech acts and verbs, and exhibit strong similarities in the linguistic syntactical patterns, to such an extent that to discern them is dicult for the legal expert, too. We describe the implemented system and report about an extensive experimentation on the new modicatory provisions. Results are discussed in order to improve both system's accuracy and annotation practice.

This paper presents the results of the MOSAICO project, an Italian Government research project (2008–12) funded by the Italian Ministry of Education and Research, and carried out by an academic consortium. The goal of the Mosaic project ( http://mosaico.cirsfid.unibo.it ) is to create a thematic and specialized digital library, relying on the Web 2.0 and the P5 TEI XML standard to manage heterogeneous descriptions of medieval codex images. The portal is designed for scholars of medieval legal history and emphasizes the intellectual path of the academic experts

I progetti nazionali di e-Government, sin dal loro primo ciclo iniziato nel 2000, sono stati funzionali per declinare a livello nazionale i temi dell'Agenda di Lisbona, di eEurope 2002, eEurope 2004, i2010 fino all'Agenda digitale europea. A questi temi europei occorre affiancare le peculiarità tipiche del sistema amministrativo italiano il quale soffre da sempre di carenze strutturali, di dispersione e frammentazione degli interventi, di poca razionalizzazione della spesa pubblica, di condizioni di lavoro. Il libro ripercorre alcuni dei momenti salienti in Italia in questo percorso verso l'eGOV.

Il paragrafo 1 del capitolo 3 introduce agli elementi essenziali della posta elettronica semplice e alla posta elettronica certificata.

I paragrafi di questo contributo descrivono la tassonomia delle modifiche normative modellabile per il tramite delle norme tecniche dello standard XML Normeinrete.

Este documento, asignado por el Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo (BID) y desarrollado por la Universidad de Bolonia, es una presentación de las ventajas, oportunidades y riesgos del XML Legislativo para la aplicación en el quehacer, o flujo de trabajo del Parlamento. Está dirigido a diferentes audiencias y expertos profesionales que participan en el sistema legislative del Parlamento.

Nel capitolo 5, paragrafo 1 si introducono le memorie di massa con particolare riguardo alla geometria degli hard disk e alle tecniche di cancellazione permanente (wiping, degaussing, etc.) nonchè di crittografia e di archiviazione di cloud computing.

I paragrafi del capitolo 2 e del capitolo 4 descrivono le macro funzionalità che mediante le regole tecniche Normeinrete è possibile realizzare quali: governare l'iter legislativo, migliorare la cooperazione, ottemperare alla certezza e conoscibilità del diritto, perseguire la qualità normativa.

I paragrafi inseriti nel capitolo 8 descrivono il sistema redazionale di testi legislaitvi Norma-Editor integrato con moduli server di consolidamento, archiviazione, versioning, ricerche intelligenti (Norma-System).

I paragrafi 1 E 2 del CAPITOLO 2 del Volume "INFORMATICA GIURIDICA PER LE RELAZIONI AZIENDALI" intendono descrivere lo stato dell'arte relativamente agli strumenti di identificazione digitale del cittadino elettronico nel contesto di e-government.

This book presents advantages, opportunities, and risks involved in applying Legislative XML to a parliamentary workflow, with particular regard to Akoma Ntoso XML standard. The way the book is organized in different sections: -- Part I offers a general introduction to the benefits and risks of Legislative XML; -- Part II introduces Legislative XML features with particular attention to the Akoma Ntoso standard; -- Part III presents XML markup support tools; and -- Part IV shows how to apply Akoma Ntoso and mark up a legal document in a way that respects the meaning of each part.

The current paper presents the “Fill the gap” project that aims to design a set of XML standards for modelling legal documents in the Semantic Web over time. The goal of the project is to design an information system using XML standards able to store in an XML-native database legal resources and legal rules in an integrated way for supporting legal knowledge engineers and end-users (e.g., public administrative officers, judges, citizens).

This volume collects the four selected contributions of the RuleML2012 Doctoral Consortium and the twelve demo papers accepted for presentation at the RuleML2012 Challenge. The RuleML Doctoral Consortium is part of the RuleML International Symposium on Rules, and is intended to attract Ph.D. researchers in the area of Rules and Markup Languages, from different backgrounds (e.g. theoretical, application, vertical domain-specific), to encourage a constructive and fruitful interdisciplinary approach. The 6th RuleML International Symposium on Rules (RuleML2012@ECAI), took place on August 27th, 2012 in Montpellier, France. The RuleML Challenge was included in the symposium for the 6th time. The Rule Challenge is devoted to disseminating the most advanced practical experiences with rule-based applications, where state-of-the-art solutions and recent research proposals meet the concrete needs of the market.

Il capitolo 7 descrive i metodi di marcatura di un documento legislativo secondo le regole tecniche XML Normeinrete.

Il presente volume è il frutto di una collaborazione fra diverse competenze: quelle scientifiche sviluppate dal CIRSFID dell'Università di Bologna - Centro interdipartimentale di ricerca in storia del diritto, filosofia e sociologia del diritto e informatica giuridica - nell'area delle tecniche legislative, e quelle di natura amministrativo-pubblicistica del Settore servizio studi e documentazione normativa dell'Area affari generali, istituzionali e partecipazioni dell'Ateneo di Bologna. Il lavoro rappresenta la sintesi sinergica di due metodologie volte a confezionare un prodotto per gli operatori della pubblica amministrazione universitaria allo scopo di armonizzare e standardizzare la redazione dei testi regolamentari a beneficio di una maggiore qualità normativa, semplificazione amministrativa, efficacia comunicativa. In collaborazione con Cosmina Calabretta e Paolo Pezzulla.

The role of official gazettes and journals in Web 2.0 is changing, and the new Web technologies are providing an opportunity to introduce new functionalities. Thus Le-gal XML is being widely adopted as a method for managing legal documentation. In this new dematerialized scenario (e-Law) the official gazettes, and the relative insti-tutional bodies, have to balance competing desiderata—XML expressiveness with the long-term preservation and integrity of documents—taking into account not only the technical aspects but also legal-philosophical considerations. One challenge will be to exploit technical advances to ensure the authenticity and validity of digital sources of law over time, all the while ensuring that system manipulations can be distin-guished from the original content issued by the law- or rule-making body. This paper presents some possible scenarios analyzing the characteristics that Legal XML should have if we are to achieve the goal of preserving the validity of digital legal documents over time for the generations to come.

Typically legal reasoning involves multiple temporal dimensions. The contribution of this work is to extend LKIF-rules (LKIF is a proposed mark-up language designed for legal documents and legal knowledge in ESTRELLA Project) with temporal dimensions. We propose an XML-schema to model the various aspects of the temporal dimensions in legal domain, and we discuss the design choices. We illustrate the use of the temporal dimensions in rules with the help of real life examples.

The new challenge of the Internet Era is to foster all the potentialities of the Web 2.0, to improve interchanging between different bodies and in the same time to preserve in the long-period the digital document collections. For the legal resources those issues are dramatically true, and they represent really critical points into the digitalization process for passing to a paperless era. This approach, adopted in the long term perspective, supports eGov, eDemocracy and eParticipation development and it creates the essential pre-requirements for the competing and growth economy. The OpenGov initiative lunched by president Obama in the January 2009 is based on the assertion to create “an unprecedented level of openness in government” for ensuring “the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration. Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in government.”. The Australian Government declares the July 2009 its endorsement to promote greater participation in Australia’s democracy. It is committed “to open government based on a culture of engagement, built on better access to and use of government held information, and sustained by the innovative use of technology.”. In this scenario the Official Gazettes organizations can play a key role adopting a Legal XML standards for preserving the legality, authenticity and authority over the time of those fundamental document collections such as law corpora. The Official Gazette body is entitled to safeguard some pillar principles: permit to all the citizen equal accessibility, guarantee transparency and independency from proprietary applications, support open access to the legal resources as a fundamental legal value in a modern democracy, favor the private sector in the usage of the public information (Directive 2003/98/EC) and in this way support interoperability.

Prefazione in volume.

This paper presents a solution for managing heterogeneous legal XML resources using a native XML repository—called eXistrella—designed to enable a common query layer within a temporal environment equipped to manage the evolution of legislative documents over time. With eXistrella, the structure of a legal document is directly connected with the legal knowledge embedded in the corresponding norms, exploiting the XML syntax used in modeling such norms, and in this way, the gap can be bridged between the container (the document) and the way the content (the norm) is modeled.

This paper presents a legal metadata interchange framework for adding semantics on top of the CEN Metalex standard. The pilot cases developed within the Estrella project and the integration with other national and international XML standards envisage the possibility to use CEN Metalex as a neutral document standard in many situations where legal information resources are involved. Nevertheless for exploiting these potentialities CEN Metalex needs to be enriched with a legal document ontology and moreover to an intermediate layer called LMIF for managing in automatic way the mapping between different local on the general structural layer.

These "Legislative Drafting Guidelines for Africa" aim at providing a set of principles and best practices for drafting primary (original) legislation. In doing so, they provide several general principles that also apply". These "Legislative Drafting Guidelines for Africa" are intended to promote a commitment to improving the quality of lawmaking and a commitment to simplicity, clarity and consistency in the drafting of laws in Africa. The Guidelines are neither binding nor exhaustive, and are not intended to override the legislative conventions and official drafting manuals of the respective countries. They can, however, promote a convergence of practices beneficial for the harmonisation of law in Africa. They are intended to serve as a reference for all bodies involved in the process of drafting legislation in Africa. It is hoped that the Guidelines will assist all those involved, in any way, in drafting legislative acts within the African Union institutions. The Guidelines aim to make African legislation as clear, simple, concise and understandable as possible by providing criteria against which the drafting of legislation may be checked to ensure that its objectives and the means by which they are attained are not only more understandable by citizens but also more easily processed by ICTs. These Guidelines are divided into three main Parts: Part I - Introduction that explains the rationale and scope; Part II - Legislative Drafting Guidelines for Africa that list the drafting guidelines; Part III - Annex - A glossary of terms used in the Guidelines. Note: The glossary has included in the Annexes so as not to interrupt the flow of the Guidelines. Nevertheless, the reader is strongly encouraged to read the glossary before or while reading the Guidelines since the terminology used - covering different traditions - may in some respects be different from that which the reader expects.

This report aims at providing an overview of the state of the art and of the prospects of the application of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in the legislative domain, in particular concerning the management of legislative documents. After a brief introduction on legal informatics, we focus on legislative informatics and identify the challenges it faces nowadays, in the framework of the Internet and the (semantic) Web. We then describe the evolution of the ICT-based management of legislative documents and identify and evaluate the emergent approaches, focusing on those based on open standards. The report is completed by two appendixes: the first reviews initiatives pertaining to the standard-based management of legal sources, the second reviews initiatives pertaining to semantic resources for legislation.

We are concerned with the automatic semantic interpretation of legal modificatory provisions. We propose a novel approach which pairs deep syntactic parsing and a fine-grained taxonomy of legal modifications. Although still in a developmental stage, the implemented system can be used to annotate with meta-information modificatory provisions of NormaInRete documents.

This deliverable is included within the activities of Workpackage 3 (WP3) which deals with the definition of effective and explicit links between legal knowledge and original legal sources the knowledge is based on. This is one of the main pre-conditions and central requirement of automated systems based on representations of legal knowledge. Each argument in fact should be backed with plausible references to legal sources proving the validity of the argument itself. Legal knowledge in ESTRELLA is represented by using a Legal Knowledge Interchange Format (LKIF), defined within the project as the main objective of WP1. It is built upon emerging XML-based standards of the Semantic Web, including RDF and OWL, and Application Programmer Interfaces (APIs) for interacting with LKIF legal knowledge systems. The LKIF is built on but go beyond this generic work to allow further kinds of legal knowledge to be modelled, including: meta-level rules for reasoning about rule priorities and exceptions, legal arguments, legal procedures, cases and case factors, values and principles. In order to establish explicit links between legal sources and legal knowledge, an open, general, jurisdiction independent and language independent XML based representation language able to describe legal sources will be defined as one of the main objectives of WP3. This standard for legal sources will be defined so that it can easily be used and coupled to LKIF knowledge models of these sources. Moreover, another primary objective of WP3 is represented by the specification and development of a Legal Sources Management System based on this standard format. This deliverable is addressed to analyse existing national standard formats for legal source representation. This analysis is the background to further activities within the project, leading to the definition and management of a European XML standard for legal sources. In particular, within such further activities, an evaluation of existing XML based legal drafting tools for specific national standards will be carried on in order to implement a prototype of ESTRELLA Legal Sources Management System; similarly current Content Management Systems (CMS) used in a legal setting and appropriate auxiliary legislation defining the way legal sources should be managed and used will be analysed.

This paper proposes some variants of Temporal Defeasible Logic (TDL) to reason about normative modifications. These variants make it possible to differentiate cases in which, for example, modifications at some time change legal rules but their conclusions persist afterwards from cases where also their conclusions are blocked.

This paper presents Norma-System, a legal information system developed by CIRSFID (of the University of Bologna) to manage legal resources over time, enabling front-office as well as back-office functions; the system can also ensure legally valid output in agreement with the principles of legal theory. In fact, content-management systems are increasingly being designed for easy management of legal resources, but they often omit to factor into the design the general legal principles on which basis a mere document repository may be made into a legal database proper, capable of presenting legal resources in proper form.

This paper proposes a framework based on Defeasible Logic (DL) to reason about normative modifications. We show how to express them in DL and how the logic deals with conflicts between temporalised normative modifications. Some comments will be given with regard to the phenomenon of retroactivity.