LegisPro Standards®

LegisPro legislative drafting and amending tools support LegalDocML, Akoma Ntoso, and USLM; the XML standardized data models for the world’s parliamentary, legislative and judiciary documents.

Xcential CEO Grant Vergottini, has played an instrumental role in creating and promoting these standards worldwide.

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Interoperability

These standards allow modern systems and applications to use the same documents and communicate. Legislatures and regulatory bodies can build component-based systems, instead of monoliths.
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Features for Rule Making

Concurrent editing, metadata handling, and process automation are enabled by key features of LegalDocML, Akoma Ntoso (AKN), and USLM. LegisPro uses these features to enable your next system.

LegalDocML is changing how governments build systems

If you investing in technology transformation, invest in open standards.

Drafting legislation in MS Word results in poorly formed XML.

Drafting legislation in LegalDocML, Akoma Ntoso, or USLM results in useful XML and metadata. The standards open options for rule-making bodies to create component-oriented systems, process automation, and the exposure of practical features for everyone involved in the rule-making process.

In addition to open regulatory and legislative standards, all Xcential products are built on open web technology for ease of adoption and long-term evolution.
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Rules as Code (RaC) is an opportunity for regulated companies.

Rules as Code or Law as Code reduce regulatory compliance and risk by digest regulation programmatically.

‍LegalRuleML is a standard designed to facilitate this value creation for governments (economic development) and regulated companies (reduction of risk and opening markets).

Xcential supports this standard and can help regulated companies capture value today.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is USLM?

United States Legislative Markup (USLM) is a 2nd generation XML schema and is a derivative of the international LegalDocML (Akoma Ntoso) standard.  The USLM schema extends the international standard to handle U.S. legislative and regulatory documents.
What is the difference between LegalDocML and Akoma Ntoso?
LegalDocML and Akoma Ntoso are both related to legal document standards, but they differ in their scope and purpose. LegalDocML is an overarching initiative by OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) to develop standards for representing, managing, and exchanging legal documents as digital resources. Akoma Ntoso is a specific standard within LegalDocML, designed to represent parliamentary, legislative, and judicial documents in a machine-readable format.
What is a component-based system vs a monolith?
Monolith systems are built as a single unit. All components are tighly coupled and the source code may be intertwined. This means that when you go to update a piece of the system, you are upgrading the whole system. Bugs and archicture issues will be present. Monolith systems may be faster to build, but are much harder to upgrade or change.

Component-based systems are built in parts with well-defined interfaces between the components. These interfaces are what ties the functions of the components together into a complete system.

LegisPro uses these well-defined interfaces in the form of LegalDocML, Akoma Ntoso, and USLM. This approach makes systems easier to upgrade.  They become "future-proof".
What if my government uses a non-standard XML schema?
You are not alone.  While most governments value standards, many XML schemas were in place prior to the open standards being finalized.

LegisPro works with any XML scheme. We can show you how.
What "open web technologies" does LegisPro use?
Every component of LegisPro was built on open technologies from the beginning. These include HTML5, CSS3+, DOM4, JavaScript, XSD, XPath, XQuery, XSLT, Chromium, Node.js, Electron, Docker, Pdoman, and Kubernetes.

Please contact us for more information.
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