RE: [legalxml-comment] [Announcement] MetaLex: an Open XML Standardfor Legal Sources

[jkeane <jik@jkeane.com>]

Thanks for this informative posting about XML development in Europe.

LegalXML/OASIS has several initiative that parallel your project.

Our Legislative Technical Committee most closely parallels your work. You can review it's charter at http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/legalxml-legislative/charter.shtml. 

"The scope of the Legislative TC will be focused upon legislation, regulations, and related documents in the United States federal and state legal domain and other countries as they participate. It is expected that the TC will assume English and eventually Spanish and French languages usage. The TC will observe the efforts of Canadian European, Australian and other government entities and will enlarge the scope of the TC to allow consideration of other countries and international bodies requirements into any standards produced by the Legislative TC."


 This group has taken on the work of the former LegalXML Citations Work Group, which was considering some DTD's developed by members., see,  http://camlaw.rutgers.edu/~jjoerg/citations 

Our CourtFiling Technical Committee has a proposed XML CourtFiling standard and an emerging Court Document specification. They have progressed quite far into a mature understanding of the practical and monumental implications of introducing XML into the Court Community.  

Our Criminal Justice Technical Committee is building a data dictionary that overlaps with CourtFiling. Their charter provides an excellent background of work to date. Of particularly note is their work on a universal object repository / data dictionary.

We are in the process of forming a OdrXML Technical Committee for on-line dispute resolution. We are working with Pravir Chawdhry and Pim van der Eijk folks from the Joint Research Center, which has developed a draft specification and schema for online dispute resolution, with some particular focus on elements of EC Consumer complaint form. See,

http://econfidence.jrc.it/default/page.gx?_app.page=entity.html&_app.action=entity&_entity.object=EC_FORUM000000000000118C&_entity.name=odr001-2001-09-07.html

We should also make sure that Murk Mueller of LeXML from Germany in part of this dialogue.

James I. Keane 
Vice-Chairman
LegalXML Steering Committee

JKeane.Law.Pro
20 Esworthy Terrace 
North Potomac MD 20878
301-948-4062 F: 301-947-9159
www.jkeane.com <http://www.jkeane.com>   
Litigation Support Systems, 2d (WestGroup)
http://www.westgroup.com/store/product.asp?product_id=13515516&catalog_name=wgstore 
 


-----Original Message-----
From: Rinke Hoekstra [mailto:rinke@lri.jur.uva.nl]
Sent: Friday, September 13, 2002 5:59 AM
To: legalxml-comment@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: [legalxml-comment] [Announcement] MetaLex: an Open XML Standard
for Legal Sources


===========
Apologies for multiple postings
===========

MetaLex: an Open XML Standard for Legal Sources

In the context of the European E-Power project, the department of Computer Science & Law of the University of Amsterdam, together with Application Engineers, have developed a proposal for a standard for the description of legal documents in XML: MetaLex. MetaLex has been presented to several Dutch public administrations and legal publishers for comments. The proposal will also be brought into the European LeXML initiative.

MetaLex provides a generic and easily extensible framework for the XML encoding of the structure and contents of legal and paralegal documents. It differs from other existing metadata schemes for legal documents in two respects: it is language and jurisdiction independent and accommodates the use of XML beyond search and presentation services.

MetaLex facilitates:
- Accessibility of legislation: search, retrieval, presentation, [RH] multilingual aspects.
- Exchangeability of legislation: in between applications as well as in between other actors, even across borders.
- Quality aspects of legislation: by formalizing the legislation defects are detected in an early stage.
- Maintainability and extensibility of legislation

MetaLex is one of the first official results of the E-Power project.  E-Power is a project, sponsored by the EC, focusing on a methodological approach for formalizing different forms of legislation into UML models.  The methodology is supported by the E-Power toolset.  E-Power is a consortium of The Dutch Tax and Customs Administration, O&I Management Partners B.V., Librt B.V. and the University of Amsterdam from the Netherlands; Application Engineers Nv. and FB Insurance NV/SA from Belgium; and Mega International from France.

For more information please visit the MetaLex web-site at:
http://lri.jur.uva.nl/METALex/




------------------------------------
Rinke Hoekstra  rinke@lri.jur.uva.nl
Department of Computer Science & Law
University of Amsterdam, PO Box 1030
1000 BA  Amsterdam,  the Netherlands
------------------------------------ 




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