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Legix.Info

Can GitHub be used to manage legislation?

Every so often, someone suggests that GitHub would be a great way to manage legislation. Usually, we roll our eyes at the naïve suggestion and that is that.

However, there are a good many similarities that do deserve consideration. What if the amending process was supported by a tool that, while maybe not GitHub, worked on the same principles?

My company, Xcential, built the amending solution for the California Legislature, using a process we like to call Amendments in Context. With this process, a proposed revision of a bill is drafted and then the amendments necessary to produce that revision are extracted as an amendment document. That amendment document, which really becomes an enumeration of proposed changes in […]

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Legix.Info

LegisPro edit will soon be ready for beta!

Our new rulemaking LegisProedit is coming along nicely. It’s a web-based XML drafting tool specifically designed for the rigors of rulemaking tasks such as legislative bill drafting. It supports both the Akoma Ntoso and the USLM legislative models and can be customized to support any other model if necessary.

This past week I gave a demonstration of it at the LEX US Summer School at George Mason University in Washington D.C. With trepidation, I allowed everyone to have a hands-on experience with it as I provided guidance. This was the first time the editor had been used by anyone outside of Xcential and the first time we had stressed server performance. While certainly not glitch […]

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Legix.Info

Data Transparency Breakfast, LEX US Summer School 2015, First International...

Last week was a very good week for my company, Xcential.

We started the week hosting a breakfast put on by the Data Transparency Coalition at the Booz Allen Hamilton facility in Washington D.C.. The topic was Transforming Law and Regulation. Unfortunately, an issue at home kept me away but I was able to make a brief pre-recorded presentation and my moderating role was played by Mark Stodder, our company President. Thank you, Mark!

Next up was the first U.S. edition of the LEX Summer School from Italy. I have attended this summer school every year since 2010 in Italy and it’s great to see the same opportunity for an open dialog amongst the legal informatics […]

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Legix.Info

Coming soon!!! A new web-based editor for Akoma Ntoso

I’ve been working hard for a long time — building an all new web-based editor for Akoma Ntoso. We will be showing it for the first time at the upcoming Akoma Ntoso LEX Summer School in Washington D.C.

Unlike our earlier AKN/Editor, this editor is a pure XML editor designed from the ground up using the XML capabilities that modern browsers possess. This editor is much more robust, more precise,  and is very scalable.

NewEditor

Basic Features

  1. Configurable XML models — including Akoma Ntoso and USLM
  2. Edit full documents or portions of large documents
  3. Flexible selection and editing regardless of XML structure
  4. Built-in redlining (change tracking) supporting textual AND structural changes
  5. Browse document sources with drag-and-drop.
  6. Full undo & […]
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Legix.Info

Upcoming U.S. and European events related to Akoma Ntoso

In my last blog post I covered the public review of the new proposed Akoma Ntoso (LegalDocML) standard for legal documents. Please keep the comments coming. In order to comment, please send email to legaldocml-comment@lists.oasis-open.org. If you wish to subscribe to this mailing list, please follow the instructions at https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/comments/index.php?wg_abbrev=legaldocml

In addition, there are three upcoming events related to Akoma Ntoso which you may wish to participate in: (this list coming from Monica Palmirani, the chair of the OASIS LegalDocML technical committee)

1. Akoma Ntoso Summer School, 27-31 July, 2015, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia (USA): http://aknschool.cirsfid.unibo.it
Registration fee: http://aknschool.cirsfid.unibo.it/logistics/registrations-and-fees/
Application Form: http://aknschool.cirsfid.unibo.it/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/ApplicationForm.pdf
Brochure: http://aknschool.cirsfid.unibo.it/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/brochure_2015_US_DEF.pdf
Deadline: end of […]

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Legix.Info

Akoma Ntoso (LegalDocML) is now available for public review

It’s been many years in the making, but the standardised version of Akoma Ntoso is now finally in public review. You can find the official announcement here. The public review started May 7th and will end on June 5th — which is quite a short time for something so complex.

I would like to encourage everything to take part in this review process, as short as it is. It’s important that we get good coverage from around the world to ensure that any use cases we missed get due consideration. Instructions for how to comment can be found here.

Akoma Ntoso is a complex standard and it has many parts. If you’re new to Akoma Ntoso, it […]

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Legix.Info

Achieving Five Star Open Data

A couple weeks ago, I was in Ravenna, Italy at the LEX Summer School and follow-on Developer’s Workshop. There, the topic of a semantic web came up a lot. Despite cooling in the popular press in recent years, I’m still a big believer in the idea. The problem with the semantic web is that few people actually get it. At this point, it’s such an abstract idea that people invariably jump to the closest analog available today and mistake it for that.

Tim Berners-Lee (@timberners_lee), the inventor of the web and a big proponent of linked data, has suggested a five star deployment scheme for achieving open data — and what ultimately will be a semantic web. […]

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Legix.Info

2014 LEX Summer School & Developer’s Workshop

This week I attended the 2014 LEX Summer School and the follow-on Developer’s Workshop put on by the University of Bologna in Ravenna, Italy. This is the fifth year that I have participated and the third year that we have had the developer’s extension.

It’s always interesting to me to see how the summer school has evolved from the last year and who attends. As always, the primary participation comes from Europe – as one would expect. But this year’s participants also came from as far away as the U.S., Chile, Taiwan, and Kenya. The United States had a participant from the U.S. House of Representatives this year, aside from me. In past years, we have also had U.S. participation from […]

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Legix.Info

Look how far legal informatics has come – in just a few years

Back in 2001 when I started in the legal informatics field, it seemed we were all alone. Certainly, we weren’t – there were many similar efforts underway around the country and around the world. But, we felt alone. All the efforts were working in isolation – making similar decisions and learning similar lessons. This was the state of the field, for the most part, for the next 6 to 8 years. Lots of isolated progress, but few opportunities to share what we had learned and build on what others knew.

In 2010, I visited the LEX Summer School, put on by the University of Bologna in Ravenna, Italy. What became apparent to me was just how […]

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Legix.Info

Imagining Government Data in the 21st Century

After the 2014 Legislative Data and Transparency conference, I came away both encouraged and a little worried. I’m encouraged by the vast amount of progress we have seen in the past year, but at the same time a little concerned by how disjointed some of the initiatives seem to be. I would rather see new mandates forcing existing systems to be rethought rather than causing additional systems to be created – which can get very costly over time. But, it’s all still the Wild Wild West of computing.

What I want to do with my blog this week is try and define what I believe transparency is all about:

  1. The data must be […]
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Grant is a leading authority on applications of XML data to legislation, regulations and government documents. He regularly serves as an instructor at the University of Bologna’s LEX School in Ravenna, Italy, providing training in Akoma Ntoso and XML standards for the lawmaking process. He is a member of the OASIS committee that has driven the development and adoption of the Akoma Ntoso (LegalDocML) standard.
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