The “Norme in Rete” Project: Standards and Tools for Italian Legislation

The “Norme in Rete” (NIR) project aims at establishing standards for Italian legislation and tools to promote their adoption. In this paper an overview of these standards, including their latest version features, as well as a description of the tools developed by ITTIG-CNR for their implementation are presented

The “Norme in Rete” Project: Standards and Tools for Italian Legislation

The “Norme in Rete” (NIR) project aims at establishing standards for Italian legislation and tools to promote their adoption. In this paper an overview of these standards, including their latest version features, as well as a description of the tools developed by ITTIG-CNR for their implementation are presented

Supporting public decision making in policy deliberations: An ontological approach

This is the post-print version of the Paper. The official published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2011 SpringerSupporting public decision making in policy deliberations has been a key objective of eParticipation which is an emerging area of eGovernment. EParticipation aims to enhance citizen involvement in public governance activities through the use of information and communication technologies. An innovative approach towards this objective is exploiting the potentials of semantic web technologies centred on conceptual knowledge models in the form of ontologies. Ontologies are generally defined as explicit human and computer shared views on the world of particular domains. In this paper, the potentials and benefits of using ontologies for policy deliberation processes are discussed. Previous work is then extended and synthesised to develop a deliberation ontology. The ontology aims to define the necessary semantics in order to structure and interrelate the stages and various activities of deliberation processes with legal information, participant stakeholders and their associated arguments. The practical implications of the proposed framework are illustrated.This work is funded by the European Commission under the 2006/1 eParticipation call

Constitute: The world’s constitutions to read, search, and compare

Constitutional design and redesign is constant. Over the last 200 years, countries have replaced their constitutions an average of every 19 years and some have amended them almost yearly. A basic problem in the drafting of these documents is the search and analysis of model text deployed in other jurisdictions. Traditionally, this process has been ad hoc and the results suboptimal. As a result, drafters generally lack systematic information about the institutional options and choices available to them. In order to address this informational need, the investigators developed a web application, Constitute [online at http://www.constituteproject.org], with the use of semantic technologies. Constitute provides searchable access to the world’s constitutions using the conceptualization, texts, and data developed by the Comparative Constitutions Project. An OWL ontology represents 330 ‘‘topics’’ – e.g. right to health – with which the investigators have tagged relevant provisions of nearly all constitutions in force as of September of 2013. The tagged texts were then converted to an RDF representation using R2RML mappings and Capsenta’s Ultrawrap. The portal implements semantic search features to allow constitutional drafters to read, search, and compare the world’s constitutions. The goal of the project is to improve the efficiency and systemization of constitutional design and, thus, to support the independence and self-reliance of constitutional drafters.Governmen

LegalHTML: semantic mark-up of legal acts using web technologies

We introduce here LegalHTML, an extension of the HTML language thought for representing legal acts. LegalHTML has been conceived in the context of an exploratory study conducted for the Publications Office of the European Union, with the objective of overcoming the proliferation of formats for the electronic redaction of legal acts, dedicated to different steps of the editorial process (e.g. first draft, content editing, proof reading, introducing semantics, publishing) and of realizing a model and a language that could bind all processes and exigencies under a common umbrella. LegalHTML satisfies these requirements by providing an explicit domain language addressing all structural aspects of an act, such as articles, paragraphs, items, references and an associated ontology (foreseeing both inline annotations through RDFa and explicit RDF code within script elements) providing rich semantics to describe the editorial and jurisdictional history of the act and to insert references to entities of the domain. Being based on HTML, presentation is also offered by the same language, an aspect missing from all most notable standards for the legal domain. Furthermore, LegalHTML addresses consolidation of an act and its subsequent modifications into a single document using a tree-based representation of the original content and of its modified versions. Finally, alongside the language & ontology, we implemented a CSS stylesheet for the default rendering of LegalHTML documents and a JavaScript file imbuing documents with an API supporting TOC generation, footnote cross-references and the said point-in-time visualization of consolidated legal acts