MetaLex

MetaLex (or CEN Metalex) is a generic and extensible framework for the XML encoding of the structure of, and meta- data about, legal and paralegal documents (obviously this includes legislation and case law, but also written public decisions, internal and external business regulations and contracts) that function as a source of law. Iti is a useful format for representing, publishing, and interchanging legal and paralegal texts. MetaLex is a common document interchange format, document and metadata … The MetaLex standard is managed by the CEN Workshop on an Open XML. METALex is not suitable for enforcing rules in legislative drafting. CEN Metalex is based on many web standards: XML, XML Schema, XML Namespaces, RDF, OWL, URIs, etc. MetaLex is an open XML standard for the markup of legal sources. MetaLex provides a generic and easily extensible framework for the XML. METALex is transparent with respect to other XML-based languages. Metalex is a knowledge management system for legislative drafting. Metalex is used by the Dutch Tax and Customs Administration.

Since there is a great variety of legal documents that cannot be covered by one normative standard, MetaLex consists of multiple schemas defining vocabularies that can be mixed in a document, which is enriched with metadata to enable retrieval and reasoning.

History

MetaLex has been developed as part of the E-POWER project. This project was aimed at the use of ICT to support European citizens and governments in dealing with an increasing lega corpus, including regulations. “A precondition for the tools that were developed in E-POWER was the electronic availability of legal sources in a structured and standard format. MetaLex was
developed to fit this need. In addition, it allows for exchange and comparison of legal documents from different sources (such as publishers). It provides a generic and easily extensible framework for the XML encoding of the structure and contents of written public decisions and public legal documents of a general and regulatory nature. MetaLex poses only minimal requirements on the structure of documents.

Currently, MetaLex is used by the Dutch Tax and Customs Administration, Be Value, the Belgian Public Centers for Welfare and others.”(1)

Main features of Metalex

MetaLex has few restrictions on its use. It is both jurisdiction-independent and language-independent. In addition to this strengths, MetaLex XML can be “freely mingled with other XML schemes. This means that MetaLex does not interfere with e.g. the proprietary XML formats being used by publishers, and can therefore be implemented within existing organisations without causing problems. …. This results in a clear structure with less chance of errors.

MetaLex is based on several existing standards of the World Wide Web Consortium: XML, RDF, RDF(S), OWL, XLink, XHTML, Web naming and addressing (URI), XSL, and XML Base. The link with RDF and OWL is especially important, since it allows for a decentralised storage of knowledge: no demands are made on the contents of a single file. By requiring every element to have an ID, MetaLex supports URIs on a very detailed level (it is possible to link to very specific elements
of the text), but it avoids commitment to a complicated syntax and semantics for URIs.

In addition, MetaLex can be combined with the Geography Markup Language (GML) to link the regulation to specific (spatial) areas, which opens the way to visualisation of the jurisdiction (of parts of) legislation on a map. It also allows access to legislation through maps.”(2)

“The main weakness of MetaLex is its lack of software support, which is true for most legal XML formats… but no MetaLex-specific tools or editors exist. Providing this software support is the most important challenge MetaLex faces.” (3)

Description

“The professional user of legislation today has to take notice of regulations from several legislators
(for instance municipality, water authority, and provincial, national, EU, and international
governments, for a civil servant in the Netherlands), and special-purpose software to support decision making processes is affected by – and may have to manipulate – legislation that conforms to many different standards for legislative drafting and is delivered in as many different formats. To be truly useful for these users and these tools, a language should be wholly independent of jurisdiction. MetaLex is therefore limited to the few features that regulatory documents from these different jurisdictions share. This leads to a simple and generic but also rather ‘trivial’ structure that does not necessarily meet specific requirements of potential users.

To allow for these specific needs, MetaLex has been structured in such a way that it is possible to add custom extensions to the schema…”(4)

“Metalex is in “compliance with open standards and proposals of the World Wide Web Consortium and other standardization bodies …. This reduces the effort of implementation and learning curve for XML developers and increases the usefulness of MetaLex documents. For this reason, the MetaLex standard is specified using W3C’s XML schema and RDF, and supports features from standards such as (X)HTML and XML Linking Language (XLink).”(5)

“Finally, a consequence of the increasing global presence of supranational legislators like the EU is a growing need to separate regulations as such from the specific authorized translations in which they are available. We have to accept as an axiom that for instance a citation in a French text to an international treaty can be resolved to the English translation of that treaty without a change in meaning for users who prefer English. Legislation is increasingly available in multiple authorized translations as a service to immigrants and – in the case of for instance fiscal regulations – potential immigrants. Therefore, a final design principle is to design MetaLex with multilingual regulations and differences between the main European languages in mind.”(6)

Other Features of Metalex:

“The granularity of mark-up differs for different section of the document.”(7)
“Publishers often add helpful commentaries and annotations to a regulation they publish. In order to make MetaLex compatible with not only the “pure” regulations but with these “embellished” regulations as well, MetaLex allows for annotations in the document. Any MetaLex element that contains part of the text of the regulation can also contain zero or more annotations. Each annotation itself consists of text and further annotations.”(8)
“MetaLex does not prescribe an URI for documents. Instead, users are free to use their own URI definitions. However, users are required to define an xml:base attribute for their MetaLex documents; although the format of URIs is not prescribed, URIs must be used.”(9)
“A MetaLex element contains three meta-information elements on the creation of the legislation.
These are: 1. author: the legislator that is responsible for creating the legislation, for instance
“the government” , “government and parliament” , “the Crown” , “the Minister of X” , etc. 2. authority: the competence the legislator has used to create or change this legislation. 3. procedure: the type of procedure that resulted in this legislation. Next are two attributes concerning the editor of the document: 1. editor: the editor that is responsible for creating and managing this MetaLex encoding of the legislation. 2. editor-resolver: this is an URI that combined with xlink:href should result in an URI (for this document) that can be resolved. This is necessary since the URI of the document is an identifier for the document that is not required to be resolvable through generic HTTP.”(10)
“Two attributes are available to connect the regulation with an area (spatial entity) in which the rules in the regulation can be applied.: 1. region: the spatial entity. This will be an URI referring to coordinates in a coordinate reference system if MetaLex is combined with GML. 2. region-resolver: a resolver for the URI in the region attribute.”(11)
MetaLex does not “provide any attributes for document classification. Regulations and legal decisions are separated because they use a different MetaLex XML schema, which have a different root element.”(12)
MetaLex XML “allows for two types of references, namely: 1. references to documents, such as “The Rome Statute, Article 1” 2. references by name to a known person (“the King” ), a body (“the Government” ), (the territory of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Europe) or concept defined in a regulation. The references can be given through an URI as well as an URL. A date can also be
added to the reference to keep track of the version being referenced.”(13)

Dates and Periods

MetaLex “keeps track of dates and periods that are relevant to the lifecycle of legislation. First of all, the date of publication is tracked. Next, the period in which the legislation is active (that is, during which the legislation may be applied) can be marked, by noting the date of enactment and the date of repeal….Legislation can be retroactive, which means that it can be applied to facts
that occurred before the legislation was published”(14) ( the efficacy period).
Similarly, legislation may have an effect that reaches past its own active period.

In order to keep track of the four periods which MetaLex keeps track, each MetaLex element “has several attributes:

• Publication date
– date-publication: the date the regulation was published.
• Enactment date
– date-enacted: the date the regulation was enacted.
– duration-to-enactment: the amount of time between the publication date and the enactment date. Used when the enactment date is not given (i.e. a law that will be enacted three months after publication).
• Date of repeal
– date-repealed: the date on which the regulation was repealed.
– duration-active: the amount of time between the date of repeal and the enactment date.
• Efficacy period
– date-start-efficacy: the starting date of the efficacy period.
– date-end-efficacy: the ending date of the efficacy period.
– duration-efficacy: the amount of time between the starting date and the ending date of the efficacy period.
• Effect period
– date-start-effect: the starting date of the effect period.
– date-end-effect: the starting date of the effect period.
For version control, a final date is added:
• Version
– date-version: the date of the serialization of the XML document.

MetaLex does not provide an attribute to keep track of all modification dates. Instead, only the most recent modification date is stored (in the date-version attribute). In a consolidated regulation, this means that different parts may have different dates, as some parts of it may have been modified, while others are still original. In addition, it is possible to keep several versions of a text in the same MetaLex document, each of them marked with a different value for the date-version attribute
(and probably different values for the other date attributes as well).”(15)

Similar Legal XLM Initiatives

“Examples of initiatives by governments are the British Legal and Advice sectors Metadata Scheme (LAMS) for ‘Just Ask!’ and the Australian Justice Sector Metadata Scheme (JSMS).Access to gocuments is mostly through a search engine interface where documents are positioned in a fixed categorization, ordered by legislative domain. Such a fixed categorization creates a potential maintenance issue: The values of attributes may change over the lifetime of a legal document, even if the document itself does not, as the concepts employed in the document change over time and become associated to (disassociated from) other concepts. Also, metadata is often not extra: it mostly concerns information already contained in the document itself, or in another document that refers to it. The classification level presupposes that the user of the classification system can read the document to find out why the classification was attached. Although such domain classification schemas have worked for jurists for centuries – most of them predate the storage of legal information on computers -, they are not necessarily adequate for electronic use. Attributes used in the classification are mostly fairly traditional: author, creation, modification and promulgation dates, jurisdiction, legal status and language. As these attributes are rather crude in meaning, the resulting classification lacks a lot of relevant detail, which renders its usefulness questionable for automated reasoning. Identification of documents by jurisdiction assumes that the user of a search service knows what jurisdictions he is in. LAMSand JSMS require no information about the structure of the document. “(16). See the “See Also”section for other XLM legal initiatives.

Text formatting

An MetaLex element can “easily be transformed to a human-readable text with a familiar layout by application of an XSL transformation. XSL sheets for translation to XHTML, RTF and PDF are included with MetaLex. It preserves the identifiers of the elements so that each element has a valid URI by which it can be referenced. References to other documents are embedded as hyperlinks.”(17)

Resources

Notes and References

General XML format(s) for legal Sources (2007), EstrellaProject
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MetaLex: An XML Standard for Legal Documents, Radboud Winkels et al.
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MetaLex

MetaLex

Main features of Metalex

Description

Other Features of Metalex:

Dates and Periods

Similar Legal XLM Initiatives

Text formatting

Resources

Notes and References

See Also

Further Reading

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