You will be able to find the filed 2010 agreement at the CEN website, or for instance at the NEN website. Make sure you get the 2010 version, or use the one on this website.

International Summer School
LEX2009: Managing Legal Resources on the Semantic Web

7th-12th September 2009
European University Institute, Law Department
Badia Fiesolana,Via dei Roccettini 9
San Domenico di Fiesole (FI), ITALY

Application deadline: 15 July 2009
http://www.one-lex.eu/Activities/summerschool09/legislativexml.html

Rationale

Good management of legal documents involves at least five aspects:

- Drafting methods, to improve the language and the structure of legislative texts;
- Legal XML standards, to improve the accessibility and interoperability of legal resources;
- Legal ontologies, to capture legal metadata and legal semantics;
- Formal representation of legal contents,to support legal reasoning and argumentation;
- Workflow models, to cope with the lifecycle of legal documentation.

The summer school will address all of these aspects, through multi- and interdisciplinary competences. It will provide and integrated approach to the management of legal  documentation, as a core aspect of legislative and administrative innovation.

Summer School Approach
The course is based on a common methodology and approach that is used by all the teachers and based on the following ten points:

1) LEX is oriented to public administrators, legal drafters, publisher of legal resources and residually to students. It is not a
conference for experts (except for the last day) nor a slot for presenting personal theories
2) We have two different kinds of students, with either ICT or Legal background. We should balance the message and make it interdisciplinary. Particular attention should be put in creating groups for the practice sessions in order to have a balance in term of competences.
3) Provide material before the lesson (not just the slides) for a personal “thinking” introduction: simple articles, news, case-law, scenarios, success cases, etc. Not more than 15 pages, ideally 5, just to stimulate curiosity.
4) Every section should ideally include at least a section of practice and exercise.
5) Each main concepts should be presented with examples or, better, by starting from examples of concrete needs, success cases, bad and good practices.
6) The exercises and the examples should ideally be connected to the countries of the students (see the list of participants).
7) Stimulate the student with group-work whenever it is possible.
We should convey understandable messages, which meet the concrete needs of the students.
9) Interdisciplinary approach with several disciplines concurrent in the creation an holistic vision.
10) Cases of excellence coming from the Public Administration and Commercial Bodies.

December 10th, 2008
Law Faculty, University of Florence (Italy)
within JURIX 2008 Conference (10-13 December 2008)

http://www.ittig.cnr.it/Jurix08
***************************************************

Organizers:
———-
- Radboud Winkels, Leibniz Center for Law, University of Amsterdam
- Enrico Francesconi, ITTIG-CNR, Institute of Legal Information Theory and Techniques, Italian National Research Council, Florence
- Alexander Boer, Leibniz Center for Law, University of Amsterdam
- Rinke Hoekstra, Leibniz Center for Law, University of Amsterdam
- Monica Palmirani, CIRSFID, University of Bologna
- Giovanni Sartor, European University Institute, Fiesole

Audience
——–
Academics, public administrations, publishers, companies in the field of IT and Law

Format
——
Paper presentations followed by discussion

Background
———-
Increasingly, legal documents are available electronically, but in a great variety of formats, published by different organizations, in different countries, jurisdictions, legal traditions and languages. They use different ways to refer internally and externally to other (legal) documents, their versioning information and other metadata differ, if present at all, etc. This makes it very hard to design and build generic software that enables access and provides services based on these sources. Semantic Web technology seems the obvious vehicle to tackle these problems.

This workshop wants to bring together people working on applying Semantic Web technology to solve practical and theoretical problems in the (para)legal field.

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

* Specific representation formalisms or standards for the legal field based on Semantic Web standards and technology (XML, URI’s, RDF, OWL, etc.)
* Legal Ontologies and applications using them
* Metadata for sources of law
* Conceptualizations of the domain of legal drafting and its products
* Web 2.0 applications in the legal domain
* Models of processes inside sources of law
* Mashup in the legal field, content aggregation, integrating legacy databases, etc.
* eGovernment as Web services (e.g. based on WSML, OWL-S, WSDL)

Time Schedule:
————-
Deadline submission position papers: 16th November 2008
Notification of acceptance: 23rd November 2008
Papers should be submitted in pdf format (maximum of 5000 words) through the Easychair Conference Management System, at:
http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=lxml2008

On September 8th a new meeting of the CEN/ISSS MetaLex workshop will be organized in Florence, Italy, in conjunction wit

h the Legislative XML Summer School. Please register for the coming workshop meeting by sending an email before the 1st of September to Tim Kniep.

The CEN/ISSS MetaLex workshop presentation itself is in principle open to everyone. Formally register your organization with the CEN as a member of the workshop if you want to have the right to vote.The 2008 workshop agreement proposal to be voted on is available here. Additional requests for changes to the technical committee are welcome.

8-13 September 2008 – San Domenico di Fiesole (Florence)

Application deadline: 10 July 2008 31 July 2008 (DEADLINE EXTENDED)

More information available here.

The school aims at providing knowledge of the most significant ICT standards emerging for legislation, an understanding of their impact in the different phases of the legislative process, awareness of the tools based on legislative standards, and the ability to participate in the preparation and use of standard-compliant documents throughout law-making process.

Aim of the course
LeX is an intensive, 6-day program that requires participants’ total dedication and intellectual commitment. The program’s learning process assists participants to develop both knowledge and skills in using and manging shared or interoperable standards for legislative document enabling access, communication, processing, and integration of legislation through IT technologies, in an open and cooperative framework.
Standards concern different aspects of legislation: abstract (logical) ways of identifying legislative documents, ways of structuring legislative documents and data, ways of dealing with changes in the law, ways of distinguishing and representing the different stages of the life cycle of a law text (from first drafts, to parliamentary discussions, to amendments, to subsequent modifications), ways of defining and applying conceptual classifications to law texts, ways of building executable representations of legislative knowledge.
All of these aspects will be addressed in the school, which aims at providing knowledge of the most significant standards emerging for legislation, an understanding of their impact in the different phases of the legislative process, awareness of the technologies based on legislative standards, and the ability to participate in the preparation and use of standard-compliant documents throughout the law-making process.

On June 4th a new meeting of the CEN/ISSS MetaLex workshop will be organized in Portorož/Portorose (a tourist location at the Slovenian coast) in conjunction with the 2008 e-Justice & e-Law international conference hosted by the EU president Slovenia. If you want to use the facilities of the 2008 e-Justice & e-Law international conference (hotel rooms and the two hour bus ride from Ljubljana airport to Portorož), make sure you register for it by the 15th of May at the latest!

The CEN/ISSS MetaLex workshop presentation itself is open to everyone! Formally register your organization with the CEN as a member of the workshop if you want to have the right to vote.

The 2008 workshop agreement proposal formally presented at this meeting will take into account the changes proposed in the 2008 proposal. Additional requests for changes to the technical committee are welcome.

The partial agreement of december 2006 was adopted by the workshop in the understanding that it will be augmented with additional agreements on ontological formalization, citation and reference, time and versioning, and components and component inclusion.

The 2008 agreement proposes additional agreements, and clarifies terminology already used in the previous agreement. The section on metadata is rewritten for purposes of clarity, and to take into account the RDF/A working draft of 18 november 2007.

New proposals are made concerning naming and addressing of legal bibliographic entities, reference and citation of legal bib

liographic entities, inclusion of manifestation-level components, and what it means to be conformant to the standard. In addition some changes are made to the existing content models in the 2006 XML schema to resolve some technical issues unco

vered over the past year in the Estrella and SEAL projects.

This CEN/MetaLex workshop is sponsored by AI-in-Law.

For those interested in extensive examples and applications of legacy MetaLex v1.3.1, we refer to the old MetaLex website at: http://legacy.metalex.eu.

Position papers of up to 2 pages on aspects relating to the following subjects are very welcome:

1. Unique identification of (parts of) sources of law, URI’s and URN’s, meaningful identifiers versus meaningless
2. Lowest grain size of identifiable elements in sources of law, what are principles or heuristics for determining a sensible grain size level
3. What set of metadata should be part of such an interchange format
4. How to link (external) models or interpretations of the meaning of sources of law to the original sources
5. Conceptualization of the domain of legislating and legislation, i.e. an ontology of the task of legal drafting and its products

Please send two page position papers, preferably in PDF format, by email to winkels@uva.nl. The deadline for submission of position papers: 23rd November 2007.

Note that this paper is about the MetaLex CEN prenorm, and not about MetaLex 1.3, its predecessor. A general remark about this confusion: MetaLex 1.3.* is still used by some important users, while MetaLex CEN is still premature. As soon as we have a more complete CEN agreement, and – very importantly – have reimplemented basic support functionality like the XSL-FO stylesheets for the CEN standard, this website will be reorganized. The MetaLex 1.3 schema will no longer be changed, except maybe for minor bug patching. Some tools that use MetaLex 1.3 are however still under development.

The LeX school is an intensive, 6-day program aimed at providing knowledge of the most significant ICT standards emerging for legislation, an understanding of their impact in the different phases of the legislative process, awareness of the tools based on legislative standards, and the ability to participate in the preparation and use of standard-compliant documents throughout the participate in law-making process.

Presentation slides are available here. Other materials can be found here. Some of the presentations discuss MetaLex.

The Bridge, a magazine of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering directed to the general audience, recently published a special issue reflecting on voting technologies (volume 37, number 2, summer 2007) that may be of interest to concerned citizens and politicians.

The LeX school is an intensive, 6-day program aimed at providing knowledge of the most significant ICT standards emerging for legislation, an understanding of their impact in the different phases of the legislative process, awareness of the tools based on legislative standards, and the ability to participate in the preparation and use of standard-compliant documents throughout the participate in law-making process.

The LeX school will address standards concerning different aspects of legislation: abstract (logical) ways of identifying legislative documents, ways of structuring legislative documents and data, ways of dealing with changes in the law, ways of distinguishing and representing the different stages of the life cycle of a law text (from first drafts, to parliamentary discussions, to amendments, to subsequent modifications), ways of defining and applying conceptual classifications to law texts, ways of building executable representations of legislative knowledge.

Organising institutions: CIRSFID (University of Bologna), European University Institute, University of Amsterdam, and ITTIG-CNR (Florence).

Directors: Enrico Pattaro and Giovanni Sartor

Program committee: Tom van Engers, Monica Palmirani, Giovanni Sartor

Scientific committee: Carlo Biagioli, Alexander Boer, Gladys Boss Sholley, Raffaella Brighi, Angelo di Iorio, Enrico Francesconi, Tom Gordon, Caterina Lupo, Pierluigi Spinosa, Daniela Tiscornia, Radboud Winkels, Flavio Zeni

Contact for information: legislativexml@eui.eu

Web site (including the detailed program and link to the application form): http://www.one-lex.eu/Activities/summerschool/legislativexml.html

The meeting will take place:

Date: 6 December 2006
Venue: University Paris II, Cersa,
10 rue thénard,
75005 Paris
Time schedule: 13:00-18:00h

Please register your attendance with Mr. Gertjan van den Akker (gertjan.vandenakker@nen.nl) before 1 December 2006. Or visit the CEN Workshop website.

Further information about the location can be found on http://jurix2006.org/.

MetaLex is committed to accepting the new version of the standard that will come out of the workshop. For current MetaLex users this means that a future version of MetaLex might be significantly different from the current one. We will try to make the transition as easy as possible, and we will still publish new versions of the current MetaLex standard. The contents of this website are about the MetaLex schema as it is now. All information relating to the CWA is linked from a subpage of this website.

In the last few years many national projects have been launched on standards for legislative texts, with the purpose of overcoming the fragmentation of legal information within national systems, as well as to contribute to legal certainty and improve the quality of legislation. Recently the experiences of
several national projects (as NIR in Italy, Metalex in the Netherlands, LexDania in Denmark, CHLeXML in Switzerland and eLaw in Austria) have been presented and compared in the ”Legislative XML Workshops” held in Macolin (CH), Kobaek-Strand (DK), Furore (IT) and Klagenfurt (AT). Now the time has come to promote a common initiative aimed at proposing European standards for legislation.

The workshop continues the series of the legislative XML workshops, and likewise aims at involving experts from all the European countries and European institutions which are developing, or aim to develop projects for standards in legislation.

As in the previous editions, the main focus of the workshop is on the presentation, comparison and discussion of concrete experiences and projects, especially those carried out by public administrations, with the purpose of sharing knowledge and best practices. For this purpose we shall organise the comparison of the results obtained by marking the same legislative text according to different national standards.

However, this workshop also has one further specific objective, namely considering the European dimension, and proposing ideas for a roadmap towards common and interoperable standards. In particular this workshop is expecting to define a roadmap leading to the submission of a project proposal on European standards for legislation, to be submitted to the next call of the program framework for EU-projects.

The standard will enable public administrations to link legal information from various levels of authority and different countries and languages. Moreover, the standard will enable companies that are active in the field of legal knowledge systems to connect to and use legal content in their applications, which allows them to support a much larger market. An open interchange format will also protect customers of such companies from vendor lock in. Finally, the standard will help to improve transparency and accessibility of legal content for citizens and businesses.

The CEN Workshop Agreement will be based upon MetaLex. MetaLex is an open format and a generic and extensible framework for the XML and RDF encoding of the structure and contents of legal documents. It aims to be jurisdiction and language-neutral, and is based on modern publishing concepts like XSLT-based transformation pipelines and emerging Semantic Web standards like RDF and OWL.

Targeted participants will include representatives from legal publishers, public administrations, academia/research groups, and businesses in the area of legal content management.

The Workshop Kick-Off meeting will take place on 7 July 2006 in the CEN/CENELEC Meeting Centre in Brussels. The draft agenda of the Kick-Off meeting is available for download here.

The Workshop Chair will be elected at the Kick-Off meeting following an open nomination (candidatures to be sent to the CEN programme Manager, Luc Van den Berghe, by 10 June). The proposed chair of the CEN/ISSS Workshop Metalex is Prof. dr. Tom van Engers and the proposed Workshop Secretary is Mr. Gertjan van den Akker (NEN). This has to be confirmed at the Workshop Kick-Off meeting.

If you want for information, wish to participate in this Kick-Off meeting, or want to register for Workshop Membership, then go here.

The main technical objective of the Estrella project is to develop a Legal Knowledge Interchange Format (LKIF), building upon emerging XML-based standards of the Semantic Web, including RDF and OWL. Our aim is to ensure thjat the Metalex standard will be compatible with this Legal Knowledge Interchange format.

Organised by the “Kärntner Verwaltungsakademie” in co-operation with the “Bundeskanzleramt” as a working group of the “Klagenfurter Legistikgespräche 2005″

Please find a first version of the programme at:
http://www.verwaltungsakademie.ktn.gv.at/
Click on: “Legislative Informatics”

Registration and additional information: legislativexml@metadat.com
(all speakers are automatically registered to the workshop)

Please do not forget to book your hotel. We suggest the place of venue:
Hotel Sandwirth
A-9020 KLAGENFURT
Pernhartgasse 9
T +43(0)463-56209
F +43(0)463-514322
http://www.sandwirth.at/

A special price for the accommodation of the workshop participants
applies.

Lunch and dinner are not included in the hotel price. We are in the
process of arranging a package which you will be able to book on site.

A city map is available at
http://www.gis-klagenfurt.at/
(German only, Internet Exporer only)

If you have further questions contact:
Harald Hoffmann
T +43 1 74040-650
METADAT – The architect for knowledge networks