Abstract
The Publications Office (OP) of European Union (EU) expressed the need to simplify the Official Journal production workflow, which required different formats and, consequently, document instances at different stages of the process. We met this need by developing LegalHTML, which unifies the formal, structural and semantic representation of legal acts, as well allowing for diverse typographic requirements for publication. This streamlines the production workflow and publication/fruition of content as well, since a single document instance is first drafted and then incrementally enriched. LegalHTML consists of an extension of HTML for the structural representation of legal acts (e.g., articles, paragraphs, items, and references), while a supplementary ontology enables the annotation (using RDFa) of domain references (e.g., signatories, people and their role in organizations, the scope of the document). LegalHTML also supports the consolidation of an act and its subsequent changes into a single document using a tree-based representation. Finally, we implemented a CSS stylesheet for the default rendering of the model and a JavaScript file imbuing documents with an API that supports TOC generation, footnote cross-references and point-in-time visualization of legal acts.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Directive (EU) 2019/1024 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 20 June 2019 on open data and the re-use of public sector information (recast). http://data.europa.eu/eli/dir/2019/1024/oj
Open Government Initiative. https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/open
Lupo, C., et al.: Deliverable 3.1: General XML format(s) for legal Sources. ESTRELLA Project (2007)
CEN MetaLex: Open XML Interchange Format for Legal and Legislative Resources. http://www.metalex.eu/
Boer, A., Hoekstra, R., Winkels, R.: METALex: legislation in XML. In: Bench-Capon, T.J.M., Daskalopulu, A., Winkels, R. (eds.) Legal Knowledge and Information Systems: Jurix 2002. IOS Press (2002)
Legal XML. http://www.legalxml.org/
Muller, M.: Legal RDF dictionary. In: XML Europe 2002, Barcelona, May 2002 (2002)
McClure, J.: Legal-RDF vocabularies, requirements & design rationale. In: Proceedings of the V Legislative XML Workshop (2006)
Palmirani, M., Vitali, F.: Akoma-Ntoso for legal documents. In: Sartor, G., Palmirani, M., Francesconi, E., Biasiotti, M. (eds.) Legislative XML for the Semantic Web. LGTS, vol. 4, pp. 75–100. Springer, Dordrecht (2011)
Akoma Ntoso. http://www.akomantoso.org/
OASIS Open. http://www.oasis-open.org/
Mangiafico, J.: Legislative Data Challenges, One Year Later. https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2015/01/legislative-data-challenges-one-year-later/. Accessed 20 Jan 2015
Formex: Formalized Exchange of Electronic Publications. In: EU Vocabularies. https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/formex
About ELI. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli-register/about.html
Schneider, J.M., et al.: Lynx: a knowledge-based AI service platform for content processing, enrichment and analysis for the legal domain. Inf. Syst. 106, 101966 (2022)
Rodriguez-Doncel, V., Montiel-Ponsoda, E.: Lynx: towards a legal knowledge graph for multilingual Europe. Law in Context 37(1), 175–178 (2020)
Athan, T., Boley, H., Governatori, G., Palmirani, M., Paschke, A., Wyner, A.: OASIS LegalRuleML. In: Fourteenth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law, New York, pp.3–12 (2013)
Capadisli, S., Guy, A., Verborgh, R., Lange, C., Auer, S., Berners-Lee, T.: Decentralised authoring, annotations and notifications for a read-write web with dokieli. In: Cabot, J., De Virgilio, R., Torlone, R. (eds.) ICWE 2017. LNCS, vol. 10360, pp. 469–481. Springer, Cham (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60131-1_33
Solid. https://solid.mit.edu/
Peroni, S., et al.: Research articles in simplified HTML: a web-first format for HTML-based scholarly articles. PeerJ Comput. Sci. 3, e132 (2017)
RELAX NG. https://relaxng.org/
ReSpec. https://respec.org/
GitHub: Where the world builds software. In: GitHub: Where the world builds software. https://github.com/
Bitbucket. https://bitbucket.org/
The One DevOps Platform | GitLab. https://gitlab.com/
Cervone, L., Palmirani, M., Vitali, F.: What it is | Akoma Ntoso. http://www.akomantoso.org/?page_id=25
Hariharan, A.: Why is Akoma Ntoso in XML and not HTML or JSON or PDF? In: AkomaNtoso.io - A Resource on Learning and using the Akoma Ntoso Schema. https://akomantoso.io/faq/why-is-akoma-ntoso-in-xml-and-not-html-or-json-or-pdf/. Accessed 25 Oct 2019
MDN contributors: Semantics - MDN Web Docs Glossary: Definitions of Web-related terms. In: MDN Web Docs. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/Semantics. Accessed 21 Sept 2022
WHATWG: Extensibility. In: HTML - Living Standard. https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/introduction.html#extensibility. Accessed 8 Dec 2022
Cruellas, J.C., Karlinger, G., Pinkas, D., Ross, J.: XML advanced electronic signatures (XAdES). In: World Wide Web Consortium - Web Standards. http://www.w3.org/TR/XAdES/. Accessed 20 Feb 2003
Publications Office of the European Union: IMFC Common Vocabulary. In: EU Vocabularies. https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/cov. Accessed 2021
Publications Office of the European Union: Corporate body Named Authority List. http://data.europa.eu/88u/dataset/corporate-body. Accessed 2011
Publications Office of the European Union: Place Named Authority List. http://data.europa.eu/88u/dataset/place. Accessed 2009
Publications Office of the European Union: Role Named Authority List. http://data.europa.eu/88u/dataset/role. Accessed 2009
Stellato, A., Fiorelli, M.: Example representation in LegalHTML of the Commission Decision 2008/589/EC. In: LegalHTML. https://w3id.org/legalhtml/examples/OJ/L_2008190EN.01001101/L_2008190EN.01001101.xhtml. Accessed 18 Dec 2022
Acknowledgements
The authors want to thank by first Willem van Gemert and Maria Westermann for believing in the concept behind LegalHTML and for starting the discussion within the OP. A special acknowledgement to the work of Edyta Posel-Czescik, Camilo Soares and Dominika Uhrikova, for making it real through the end. Last, but surely not the least, we mention the devoted effort of Véronique Parisse who carefully reviewed our work and of all other staff who supported our preliminary investigation (Zilvinas Bubnys, Maria Kardami, Christian Marien and Tamas Schlemmer, among the many).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Stellato, A., Fiorelli, M. (2023). LegalHTML: A Representation Language for Legal Acts. In: Pesquita, C., et al. The Semantic Web. ESWC 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13870. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33455-9_31
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33455-9_31
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-33454-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-33455-9
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)