Premier niveau (les anglophones parlent de ‘pilier’ ou ‘pillar’), fondation nécessaire à la structuration (LegalDocML, 2e niveau) et à la gestion des relations (ontologie ou LegalRuleML, 3e niveau), la norme d’identification (de « balisage » ou « Markup Langage » pour le ML), il convient de normaliser les règles de citations des textes juridiques. A ce titre, on devrait parler de LegalCiteML avec un L final pour « language » (de balisage), mais le groupe de travail se nomme LegalCiteM, sans le L, parce que justement, il n’est pas question ici de balisage, comme pour la structuration du LegalDocML, mais d’identifiant (URI ou IRI).

Un groupe de travail de l’OASIS a été crée en avril 2014 et se nomme Legal Citation Markup (LegalCiteM). (Voir son wiki)

• On 2014-01-14, OASIS announced the formation of a new Legal Citation Markup (LegalCiteM) Technical Committee, per the Call for Participation.
• OASIS Discussion List: legalcite-markup-discuss. Subscribe, and then post to legalcite-markup-discuss@lists.oasis-open.org, or visit the list archive.
• Draft Proposal for a New OASIS Technical Committee (Legalcite)
• Summary of Draft Proposal for a Legal Citation Markup Standard

URI: http://xml.coverpages.org/neutral-legal-citation-data-and-markup-models.html

Une remarquable bibliographie a été préparée par Robin Cover pour ce groupe de travail OASIS en 2014.

A Standardized Data/Markup Model to Support Neutral Citation of Court Cases, Legislation, and Regulations

http://xml.coverpages.org/neutral-legal-citation-data-and-markup-models.html

Elle indiquait quelques exemples de réalisations :

Examples of formal markup language vocabularies and syntaxes for composing and addressing machine-readable identifiers in structured citations (selections; others are omitted for brevity): Akoma Ntoso, BWB XML and CEN MetaLex, CEN MetaLex Server, CLML (Crown Legislation Markup Language), ECLI (European Case Law Identifier), ELI (European Legislation Identifier), IETF LEX URN, Juriconnect, ‘legislation.gov.uk’ FRBR URIs, ‘legislation.gov.uk’ versioning, Overheid.nl and Wetten.nl identifiers, PRESTO

C’est sur un document de base du groupe de travail LegalDocML que se trouvent les principaux éléments de réflexion sur les identifiants (IRI) dans le cadre de la norme Akoma Ntoso, et leur intégration selon les spécifications fonctionnelles normalisées du FRBR.

OS Akoma Ntoso Naming Convention Version 1.0 OASIS Standard 21 February 2019

 

IRI (Normative)

IRI ou Internationalized Resource Identifier (en français « Identificateur de ressource internationalisé ») est un type d’adresse informatique prenant en compte les divers alphabets

4.1 Introduction to compliant IRI syntaxes

The Akoma Ntoso standard defines a number of referenceable concepts that are used in many situations in the lifecycle of legal documents.

The purpose of this section is to provide:

1. a) a standard referencing mechanism to these concepts through the use of IRI references associated to classes and instances of an ad hoc ontology (the Akoma Notoso Naming Convention). The referencing mechanism discussed in this document is meant to be generic and evolving with the evolution of the underlying ontology;
2. b) a set of requirements for other naming conventions to be usable within Akoma Ntoso XML resources in a proper way (Functionally Equivalent Naming Conventions see 4.12).

4.2 Document IRIs

The most important concepts of the Akoma Ntoso informal ontology are related to documents that have legal status. All discourses and all descriptions of legal sources can be characterized as referring to one of the four levels of a document as introduced by IFLA FRBR ([FRBR]):

(a)   Work – the abstract concept of the legal resource (e.g., act 3 of 2015).

(b)   Expression – any version of the Work whose content is specified and different from others for any reason: language, versions, etc. (e.g., act 3 of 2015 as in the version following the amendments entered into force on July 3^rd, 2016).

(c)   Manifestation – any electronic or physical format of the Expression: MS Word, Open Office, XML, TIFF, PDF, etc. (e.g., PDF representation of act 3 of 2015 as in the version following the amendments entered into force on July 3^rd, 2016).

(d)   Item – the physical copy of any Manifestation in the form of a file stored somewhere in some computer on the network or disconnected (e.g., the file called act32015.pdf  on my computer containing a PDF representation of act 3, 2015 as in the version following the amendments entered into force on July 3^rd, 2016).

All documents at all levels can be composed of sub-elements that, when combined, form the whole document. These are called components and abstractly represent the notion that several independent subdocuments form the whole document as it appears to the reader (i.e., a main body possibly followed by a number of attachments such as schedules and tables):

• WorkComponents (e.g., main, schedule, annexes, table) – the WorkComponents are abstract entities that can be referenced to refer to different ExpressionComponents in time.
• ExpressionComponent (e.g., main, schedule, annexes, or table.) – the ExpressionComponents represent the visible division of the document as generated by the content author (Parliament, etc.) for a specific Expression of the Work.
• ManifestationComponent (e.g., xml files, PDF files, or TIFF images.) – the ManifestationComponents represent the division of the document as generated by the Manifestation author (e.g., the XML editor) for a specific Manifestation of a specific Expression.
• ItemComponent – the actual files corresponding to the ManifestationComponents

Other concepts dealt by the Akoma Ntoso informal ontology also derive from the IFLA FRBR ontology, and include, but are not limited to, individuals (Person), organizations (Corporate Body), actions and occurrences (Event), locations (Place), ideas (Concept) and physical objects (Object).

4.3 Absolute and Relative IRIs

At all levels, the Akoma Ntoso IRIs belong to the http:// scheme and are normally resolved using mechanisms widely available in browsers and web servers. Within documents, IRIs are used as references to addressable resources, and are thus called IRI references.

According to the authoritative source RFC 3986[2], all http:// IRI references are divided into absolute IRI and relative IRI references. An absolute IRI starts with the string “http://”, which is then followed by an officially registered domain name, and the local part that starts off the first individual “/” character. A relative reference, on the other hand, has no indication of the scheme, no indication of the domain name, and may have further missing parts at the beginning of the whole string (no missing parts on the end, though). Browsers are able to build the absolute IRI corresponding to the relative IRI by adding at the beginning of the provided IRI the missing parts that are taken from the IRI of a base resource.

In XML manifestations of Akoma Ntoso documents, IRI references are always expressed in relative forms.

This implies that any resolution is carried out by the source of the base document (e.g., the one where the IRI reference is stored). This makes all IRIs independent of the actual resolution mechanism, and allows for very flexible storage, access, and reference mechanisms. This means that all resolution mechanisms used to access an Akoma Ntoso document from another Akoma Ntoso document will rely on the same resolution mechanism as the original one, regardless of the resolution mechanism employed to generate the documents themselves. In case the hosting document lacks a base IRI, it is the responsibility of the active application to provide a base IRI in its stead.

Since it is a requirement of Akoma Ntoso that all existing FRBR items of a Manifestation are byte-per-byte identical to each other, it is a natural consequence that it is not abstractly relevant which resolution engine dereferences the actual Item whose IRI is resolved out of a Work-level, an Expression-level, or a Manifestation-level IRI reference. This, in practice, means that protocol and authority are not contributing information to the resolution, and are thus interchangeable. Parties interested in absolute IRIs for Akoma Ntoso are required to produce their own resolution engine and use its protocol and authority for the purpose.

Another distinction is between global and local IRI references[3]. A global IRI reference is a relative IRI reference where all parts are present except for protocol and authority (i.e., domain name). Thus, a global IRI reference always starts with a slash, to indicate that all other parts are explicitly specified. A local IRI reference, on the other hand, may have one or more parts missing (necessarily from left to right), and the corresponding global (and, subsequently, absolute) IRI reference is determined by adding the corresponding parts taken from the base document, as usual with relative IRI references with missing parts. In the following we will call all IRI references as simply IRI (they are all references, after all), and distinguish between absolute IRIs, global IRIs and local IRIs.

In XML manifestations of Akoma Ntoso documents, all Work, Expression, and Manifestation-level references to whole documents must be global, and all references to individual components within the same level (or lower levels) must be local and are stored simply as the name of the corresponding component.

Thus, for instance, « /akn/kn/act/2015-01-01/1/!schedule_1 » is the relative, global Work-level IRI for schedule 1 of act 1/2007 of Kenya. However, a Work-level reference to schedule 1 placed within the main document of the act will only contain the local IRI « 1/!schedule1 ». This guarantees that these references continue to work even after new expressions are created of the same Work, either if the part containing the reference is changed or if it remains untouched.

Akoma Ntoso XML elements refer to other documents according to different levels of the FRBR hierarchy. In particular, <ref>, <mref>, and <rref> point to Work-level and occasionally Expression-level IRIs only, while <object>, <img>, and <attachment> always point to Manifestation-level IRIs. As the global/local distinction is involved, <ref>, <mref>, and <rref> elements always use global IRIs for documents different than the host, while <img> or <attachment> always refer to components of the host document, and thus always use local references.

In the Akoma Ntoso Naming Convention, a reference to a different document is always global:

<ref href= »/akn/kn/act/2015-08-10/123/!main~sec_12″>section 12 of act 13/2006</ref>

This means that whenever referring to a different document it is necessary to provide the full list of identification parts even when they are identical to the ones of the base document. On the other hand, local IRI references are used in the Akoma Ntoso naming convention for references to components or fragments, and implicitly make use of the identification parts of the base document for the correct resolution of the IRI reference.

Global IRI references are discussed in sections 4.4 through 4.8, while local IRI references are discussed in section 4.9.

4.4 Resolving Akoma Ntoso IRI references

The Akoma Ntoso naming architecture is built so as not to rely on the existence of a single storage architecture, since the IRIs stored within documents are differentiated from the ones physically representing the resource being sought.

The mapping from architecture-independent IRIs into accessible architecture-dependent URLs (representing the best Item for the document being sought) is realized through specific applications called IRI resolvers. The Akoma Ntoso naming architecture is built so as not to rely on the existence of any individual IRI resolver, but assumes that all IRIs are always correctly resolved to the best available Item regardless of the resolving mechanisms. In fact, each naming authority is given the global task of resolving any possible Akoma Ntoso IRIs, regardless of whether it belongs or not to the country or countries managed by the naming authority. This implies that the authority-specific details of IRIs are purposefully omitted in this specification, and need to be considered only when first accessing a document.

For this reason, all IRIs in this specification are prefixed with the arbitrary domain name [http://www.authority.org] that stands for any of an arbitrarily large number of equivalent naming authorities.

The IRI reference for the Work is the baseline for building the IRI reference for the Expression (section 4.5), which is the baseline for the IRI reference of the Manifestation (section 4.6). Additionally, all IRI references can be enriched with information about the component and the fragment requested (section 4.8). IRI references for items are beyond the scope of this Naming Convention.

4.5 The IRI reference of a Work

The IRI for the Work consists of the following pieces, separated by forward slashes “/”:

• The base URL of a naming authority with IRI-resolving capabilities (not relevant for the Naming Convention). In all our examples this will always be described as [http://www.authority.org], as explained in section 4.3.
• A detail fragment that organizes additional data in a hierarchical fashion:

–      The /akn prefix to allow the identification of the IRI as belonging to the Akoma Ntoso Naming Convention (required)

–      Country or subdivision (a two-letter or code according to ISO 3166-1 [ISO3166] or a short and unique alphanumeric codes according to ISO 3166-2 [ISO3166-2]). For an Akoma Ntoso XML representation, this value MUST correspond to the content of the element <FRBRcountry> in the metadata. (required)

–      Type of document. For an Akoma Ntoso XML representation, this value MUST correspond to the element immediately below the akomaNtoso root element (e.g., act, bill, or debateReport.) (required)

–      Any specification of document subtype, if appropriate. For an Akoma Ntoso XML representation, this value MUST correspond to the content of the element <FRBRsubtype> in the metadata or, in its absence, to the “name” attribute of the document type (optional).

–      The emanating actor, unless implicitly deducible by the document type (e.g., acts and bills do not usually require actor, while ministerial decrees and European legislation do). For an Akoma Ntoso XML representation, this value MUST correspond to the content of the element <FRBRauthor> in the <FRBRWork> section of the metadata (optional).

–      Original creation date (expressed in YYYY-MM-DD format or just YYYY if the year is sufficient for identification purposes). For an Akoma Ntoso XML representation, this value MUST correspond to the content of the element <FRBRdate> in the <FRBRWork> section of the metadata (required).

–      Number or title or other disambiguating feature of the Work (when appropriate, otherwise optionally the string nn). For an Akoma Ntoso XML representation, this value MUST correspond to the content of element <FRBRnumber> or <FRBRname>, respectively, in the metadata (required when necessary for disambiguation, optional otherwise).

–      Component and fragment specifications, as specified in sections 4.7 and 4.8 (optional)

 

For example:

• [http://www.authority.org]/akn/dz/debaterecord/2004-12-21
  Algerian parliamentary debate record, 21^stDecember 2004.
• [http://www.authority.org]/akn/sl/act/2004-02-13/2
  Sierra Leone enacted Legislation. Act number 2 of 2004.
• [http://www.authority.org]/akn/ng/bill/2003-05-14/19
  Namibia Bill number 19 of 2003
• [http://www.authority.org]/akn/mg/act/2003-03-12/3
  Madagascar. Act 3 from 2003
• [http://www.authority.org]/akn/ke/act/decree/MinistryForeignAffairs/2005-07-12/3
  Kenya, Decree n. 3 of 2005 by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs
• [http://www.authority.org]/akn/it-45/act/legge/consiglio/2004-05-24/11
  Regione Emilia-Romagna (it-45) Act n. 11 of 24 May 2014
• [http://www.authority.org]/akn/UN/doc/standard/FAO/1981/CODEXSTAN33-1981/
  FAO standard CODEXSTAN33-1981 of 1981.

4.6 The IRI reference of an Expression

Characterizing the Expression is the specific identification of the features of the content. This includes specifications of the version and the language of the Expression. Therefore, different versions of the same Work, or the same version of the same Work expressed in different languages correspond to different Expressions and will have different IRIs. Expressions are organized in components (the ExpressionComponents), and therefore we need to identify separately the Expression as a whole from the individual IRIs for each ExpressionComponent. All of them are all immediately derived from the baseline, which is the IRI for the Work.

4.6.1 The IRI for the Expression as a Whole

The IRI for the Expression as a whole consists of the following pieces:

• The IRI of the corresponding Work as discussed in section 4.4
• The character “/”
• The human language code in which the Expression is drafted (a three-letter code according to ISO 639-2 alpha-3). For an Akoma Ntoso XML representation, this value MUST correspond to the content of the first element <FRBRlanguage> in the metadata section. According with ISO 639-2 alpha-3 “mul” means multilingual document (text with different languages), while “und” means undetermined language
• The “@” character (required)
• Zero or more semicolon-separated version identifiers as follows:

–       If an approved act, the version date of the Expression in syntax YYYY-MM-DD. For an Akoma Ntoso XML representation, this value MUST correspond to the content of element <FRBRdate> in the <FRBRExpression> section of the metadata. If appropriate, the date can be integrated with a time using values for the XSD:dataTime datatype: Thh:mm:ss±hh:mm. The difference between the local time and Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) is specified using the sign + or – followed by the difference from UTC represented as hh:mm (note: the minutes part is required). See ISO 8601 Date and Time Formats and XML Schema Part 2: Datatypes (http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-2/).

–       If any other document, the presentation date is appropriate, or the version number if one exists, or any other disambiguating string that helps identifying the specific version of the document. For an Akoma Ntoso XML representation, this value MUST correspond to the content of element <FRBRversionNumber>

• Any content-specification date (as opposed to validity dates) (optional).
• Any content authoring information to determine the authoriality of the text content (optional). This is separate and independent of the authoring information relative to the metadata and markup, which are among the features of the Manifestation (optional). For an Akoma Ntoso XML representation, this value MUST correspond to the content of element <FRBRauthor> in the <FRBRExpression> section of the metadata.

 

The absence of the version identifiers signals two different situations depending on the type of document:

–       If the document is not versioned (e.g., the debate record of an assembly) then version identifier need not and cannot be present.

–       If the document is versioned (e.g., an act in force), then the lack of version identifiers refers to the version in force at the moment of the resolution of the IRI (i.e., the “current” version of the act, where “current” refers to the moment in time in which the IRI is dereferenced, rather than the moment in time in which the document containing the IRI was created: today for the reader, as opposed to today for the author of the references).

 

A particular Expression is the first version of a Work. This Expression should not be confused with the Work itself (which considers the first Expression in no special way to all other possible expressions), and it is a very specific, although peculiar, Expression. The first version of an Expression is referred to with an IRI with a dangling « @ » character (which implies that the actual version date is the first appropriate date for that Work).

 

–       [http://www.authority.org]/akn/dz/debaterecord/2004-12-21/nn/fra
Algerian parliamentary debate record, 21st December 2004, French version, with nn optional undefined number.

–       [http://www.authority.org]/akn/sl/act/2004-02-13/2/eng
Sierra Leone enacted Legislation. Act number 2 of 2004.  English version, current version (as accessed today [according to the reader])

–       [http://www.authority.org]/akn/sl/act/2004-02-13/2/eng@
Sierra Leone enacted Legislation. Act number 2 of 2004.  English version, original version

–       [http://www.authority.org]/akn/sl/act/2004-02-13/2/eng@2004-07-21
Sierra Leone enacted Legislation. Act number 2 of 2004. English version, as amended on July 2004

–       [http://www.authority.org]/ /akn/uy/bill/ejecutivo/carpeta/2005-04-04/137-2005/esp@2005-05-02T13:30:00-03:00
Uruguay bill. Number 137-2005, at 2005-04-04. Spanish version, as amended on May 2^nd, 2005, at 10.30 Montevideo time.

–       [http://www.authority.org]/akn/ng/bill/2003-05-14/19/eng@first
Namibia Bill number 19 of 2003, first version, English version

–       [http://www.authority.org]/akn/mg/act/2003-03-12/3/mul
Madagascar. Act 3 from 2003, current version (as accessed today [according to the reader])  in multilingual text (in this case, French and Malagasy).

–       [http://www.auth.org]/akn/sl/act/2004-02-13/2/eng@2004-07-21/officialpublisher
Sierra Leone enacted Legislation. Act number 2 of 2004.  English version, as amended on July 2004. Official version. Emitted by publisher body.

–       [http://www.authority.org]/akn/eu/bill/DIR/CONSIL/2013/COM(2013)344/eng@final_2
Proposal for an European directive of the Council – English variant,  version “final/2”.

–        [http://www.authority.org]/akn/uy/act/2008-08-11/18331/esp@2009-12-12;2010-01-01~art_3__para_5__point_c
Act of Uruguay n. 18331 in the version of 2009, Dec 12, with a retroactive modification happened in 2010.

4.6.2 The IRIs for Virtual Expressions

In some situations, the information such as the actual enter-in-force date or the language of an Expression is not known in advance, or it is necessary to create references or mentions of documents whose features are now known completely (possibly, because their exact delivery date is not known yet). These are called virtual expressions (i.e., references to expressions that probably do not exist yet or ever, but can be unambiguously deduced once all relevant information is made available.)

There are at least three cases where such a situation may arise:

1. The information is not known by the author of the reference (e.g., the legislator), in which case the act of actually retrieving the correct information is in itself an act of interpretation.
2. The information is not known by the editor of the text containing the reference (e.g., the publisher of the XML version of the document), in which case the information can theoretically be available, but is too much of a burden for the publisher to retrieve it.
3. The information is not known by the query system when evaluating the reference.

In these cases, the syntax for the IRI of the virtual Expression uses a similar syntax to the specification of the actual Expression, but the character “:” is used before each unknown value and instead of the “@” at the end of the specification of the Work-level IRI. For instance, if we need to reference the Expression of an act in force on date “1/1/2007”, we will probably need to refer to some Expression whose enter in force date was in a previous date to 1/1/2007.

–      [http://www.authority.org]/akn/sl/act/2004-02-13/2/eng:2007-01-01
Sierra Leone enacted Legislation. Act number 2 of 2004.  English version, as amended on the closest date before January 1st, 2007

–      [http://www.authority.org]/akn/eu/act/2004-11-13/87/und:2015-01-10
European Directive number 2004/87/EC of 2004. All the language versions, as amended on the closest date before January 10, 2015

Similarly, if we need to refer dynamically to the expressions in German of a specific act, we need to make a virtual reference whose date is left unspecified, and the language is forced to be German, as follows (deu is SO 639-2 alpha-3 code for German).

–       [http://www.authority.org]/akn/ch/act/2009-05-09/432/deu:
Swiss enacted Legislation. Act number 432 of 2009.  Dynamic reference to any of the German versions.

–      [http://www.authority.org]/akn/it/act/2005-03-07/82/eng:2010-01-01->2015-12-31
Italian enacted Legislation. Act number 82 of 2005-03-07.  Dynamic reference to any of the Italian versions valid within the interval January 1^st 2010 to December, 31^st 2015.

 

4.7 The IRI reference of a Manifestation

Characterizing the Manifestation is the specific process that generates an electronic document in a specific format. This includes specifications of the data format used. Therefore, different Manifestations of the same Expression generated in different data formats will have different IRI references.

All of them are all immediately derived from the baseline, which is the IRI for the Expression.

The IRI for the Manifestation as a whole consists of the following pieces:

–       The IRI of the corresponding Expression as a whole

–       The markup authoring information (useful to determine the authoritativeness of the markup and metadata) (optional). For an Akoma Ntoso XML representation, this value MUST correspond to the content of element <FRBRauthor> in the <FRBRManifestation> section of the metadata.

–       Any relevant markup-specific date (optional). For an Akoma Ntoso XML representation, this value MUST correspond to the content of element <FRBRdate> in the <FRBRManifestation> section of the metadata.

–       Any additional markup-related annotation (e.g., the existence of multiple versions or of annotations.) (optional)

–       The character “.” (required)

–       A unique three or four letter extension signifying the data format in which the Manifestation is drafted (required). For instance, such extension can be “pdf” for PDF, “doc” or “docx” for MS Word, “htm” or “html” for HTML “xml” for an XML Manifestation, or “akn” for the package of all documents including XML versions of the main document(s) according to the Akoma Ntoso vocabulary. For an Akoma Ntoso XML representation, this value MUST correspond to the content of element <FRBRformat> in the <FRBRManifestation> section of the metadata.

Some examples:

–       [http://www.authority.org]/akn/dz/debaterecord/2004-12-21/fra@.doc
Word version of the Algerian parliamentary debate record, 21st December 2004, Original French version

–      [http://www.authority.org]/akn/sl/act/2004-02-13/2/eng.pdf
PDF version of the Sierra Leone act number 2 of 2004, English version, current version (as accessed today)

–      [http://www.authority.org]/akn/sl/act/2004-02-13/2/eng@2004-07-21.akn
Package of all documents in Akoma Ntoso XML of the Sierra Leone act number 2 of 2004.  English version, as amended in July 7th 2004.

–      [http://www.authority.org]/akn/sl/act/2004-02-13/2/eng@2004-07-21/CIRSFID/2011-07-15.akn
Package of all documents including XML versions of the Sierra Leone enacted Legislation. Act number 2 of 2004.  English version, as amended in July 2004. Rendered in Akoma Ntoso by CIRSFID on 15 July 2011.