We built our first bill drafting system in 2002 for the state of California. It took several years to deploy the first version and substantially longer to get to a feature complete state – actually after 2010 (although the progress was piece-meal). The system took an off-the-shelf XML editor, XMetaL, and adapted it to the drafting requirements of the State of California.
The 2019 edition of the LEX Summer School and the Akoma Ntoso Developer’s Workshop are coming up in September and will be held at the Ravenna Campus of the University of Bologna in Ravenna, Italy. These events are a good way to learn about developments in legal informatics, get an introduction to XML, Akoma Ntoso, and other related technologies, and to interact with other members of our small community.
The dates are September 9th-14th for the Summer School and September 16th-17th for the developer’s workshop. You can learn more at http://summerschoollex.cirsfid.unibo.it/
For me, this will be […]
“I love it when a plan comes together!” Remember that old line from Hannibal on the A-Team TV show? I’ve been feeling that lately.
I’m often asked what XML editor it is built from. The answer is that we built our own. Why? That would seem like madness. Building an editor, any editor, is very difficult. Indeed, I built my first editor way back in 1985 and in the years since I’ve built or customized many editors ranging from schematic editors for PCB and wire harness design, visual language-based editors for designing microchips, as well as a few legislative drafting editors. Of all the editors I’ve built, building LegisPro has been the most challenging.
Two blogs ago I wrote about how technology waves come about, the stages they all go through, and the benefits and risks that come from when you choose or how you choose to ride a particular wave. Then, in my last blog I described what I see as the four generational waves in legislative information technology – starting with the mainframe era in the 1980s, the office productivity era of the 1990’s, the XML era of the 2000s, and the current standards wave starting in the 2010’s.
In my last blog, I wrote about how technology waves define distinct software generations and how choosing to ride the waves determines the risks – both in terms of development risk and time to obsolescence. In this blog, I’m going to explore the four generations of technology I’ve seen in the legislative information technology market.
Technologies come in waves. Rather than a constant evolution forward, major disruptions to the status quo tend to happen every decade or so. The resulting waves create generations of tools that reflect the times in which they were built.
Perhaps you have noticed that my blogging has been rather sparse of late. There is a reason for that – I’ve been totally occupied with the development of LegisPro. It’s come a long way in the past year. So what’s new?
If you are like me, learning a new technology by reading the standards documents is a difficult task. Standards documents are written to describe a technology, not teach it. They are supposed to completely describe the standard, preferably without resorting to examples to make their point. They use precise language and complicated words prescribed by standards style guides.
LegisPro Sunrise is almost done!. It has taken longer than we had hoped it would, but we are finally getting ready to begin limited distribution of LegisPro Sunrise, our productised implementation of our LegisPro drafting and amending tools for legislation and regulations. If you are interested in participating in our early release program, please contact us at info@xcential.com. If you already signed up, we will be contacting you shortly.
