Akoma Ntoso

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 was selected for nominating this legal XML standard. The usual acronym is AKN, to designate the ''XML AKN format''.

Definition

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 :

* an XML vocabulary that defines the mapping between the structure of legal documents and their equivalent in XML;
* specifications of an XML schema that defines the structure of legal documents in XML. They provide rich possibilities of description for several types of parliamentary, legislative and judiciary document, such as bills, acts and parliamentary records, judgments, or gazettes;
* a recommended naming convention for providing unique identifiers to legal sources based on FRBR model;
* a MIME type definition.

Description

Akoma Ntoso is an international legal document standard that serves as 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 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 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 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 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 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.

History and adoption throughout the world

Akoma Ntoso started as an UNDESA project in 2004 within the initiative "Strengthening Parliaments’ Information Systems in Africa". Its core vocabulary 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 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 the legislation.gov.uk.

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

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