MetaVex: Regulation Drafting meets the Semantic Web
Saskia van de Ven, Rinke Hoekstra and Radboud Winkels
Leibniz Center for Law, Faculty of Law, University of Amsterdam
PO Box 1030, 1000 BA, Amsterdam
{s.vandeven,hoekstra,winkels}@uva.nl
ABSTRACT
Currently almost all legislative bodies throughout Europe
use general purpose word-processing software for the draft-
ing of legal documents. These regular word processors do
not provide specific support for legislative drafters and par-
liamentarians to facilitate the legislative process. Further-
more, they do not natively support metadata on regulations.
This paper describes how the MetaLex regulation-drafting
environment (MetaVex) aims to meet such requirements.
Keywords
XML, RDF(S), OWL, metadata, regulation, drafting, se-
mantic web, tool
1. INTRODUCTION
Legislative drafting, and designing amendments to exist-
ing or new legislation are important parts of the work done
by national parliaments, regional assemblies, city councils
and ministries in Europe. Currently almost all of these leg-
islative bodies use general purpose word-processing software
to create legal documents.
However, these regular word processors generally do not
provide users with targeted support to facilitate the legisla-
tive process. They are often badly integrated with legacy
systems that support storage, search and publishing facil-
ities, and provide no streamlined environment for drafting
and discussing legislation and other kinds or regulations.
Such an environment would integrate workflow, search facil-
ities, tools to support group dynamics (including versioning
and distribution) and features that facilitate publication.
Legislative drafting is a complex process that takes place
in a political and dynamic environment, which involves many
stake-holders. Since a new or adapted regulation is often
connected to existing laws, the drafters and other stake-
holders should be aware of relationships between the law
under construction and those existing legal sources. Legal
drafting practice has learned that legal quality can benefit
from the use of specific legal drafting patterns.
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The SEAL project (Smart Environment for Assisting the
drafting and debating of Legislation)1 develops a supportive
environment that enables easy construction of legal drafts
using drafting patterns and creation of connections from
and to existing legal sources. The infrastructure will pro-
vide access to a repository with existing laws, draft versions
and amendments and will offer easy to use access methods.
Collaboration between stake-holders will be supported by
groupware facilities such as automated signalling functions
and routing of drafts and amendments. This environment
will be developed for three European parliaments. An ini-
tial working environment is foreseen in 2007. This will be
tested, refined and implemented in co-operation with the
parliaments and legislation drafters during the project.
The MetaLex regulation-drafting environment (MetaVex)
is developed at the Leibniz Center for Law and is one of the
three environments being evaluated in SEAL. For informa-
tion about the other two environments, see [1] and [8]. In
the following sections we identify the requirements, intro-
duce the XML document standard underlying the system,
and describe its current status.
2. REQUIREMENTS
MetaVex aims to streamline the legislative process by ad-
dressing the problems discussed in the introduction. In this
section we describe the requirements against which the en-
vironment is evaluated. These criteria can be summarized
as follows:
Look and Feel The editing environment should provide a
look and feel similar to normal word processors. Doc-
ument editing should be done in a WYSIWYG2 in-
terface; this way legal drafters can create document
structure and content without knowledge of specific
commands or technical notations.
Drafting Patterns Legislative drafters should be supported
by the editor in complying to prescribed legal drafting
patterns. Offering users suggestions and predefined
phrases in the form of templates improves and speeds
up the process of generating document structure and
content.
Referencing The use of references to other legal sources is
an important way by which drafters add structure and
1SEAL is a project in the e-Participation initia-
tive of the European Commission. See http://www.
eu-participation.eu/seal
2What You See Is What You Get

meaning to a document. The editor should facilitate
the frequent use of these references and offer ways to
validate the legal sources they cite. References should
be detailed, i.e. point to the smallest relevant element
of a regulation.
Metadata A way to store extra information about a doc-
ument e.g. author, version, modification, should be
provided. Possibilities to add information concerning
document structure as well as content is regarded as
an advantage.
Version Management The environment should offer sup-
port to manage document versions, starting from the
first draft until and beyond the time at which the doc-
ument is published. This allows users to always be
able to identify the latest version of a document.
Groupware By using groupware facilities, drafters can col-
laborate on the same project. These facilities will not
only consist of sharing comments or amending existing
legislation, but will allow for elaborate authorisation
and accountability management.
Workflow Workflow support should be an integral part of
the environment to be able to divide tasks into sub-
tasks, assigning them to people and keeping track of
progress.
Storage Users should be able to store documents in a local
data repository, providing them with advanced search
mechanisms. It should also be possible to connect to
a server with various types of clients over the internet,
e.g. by using a browser.
Publishing The environment should allow straightforward
publishing of texts in legacy formats. This allows pub-
lishing of legal drafts in an early stage, which makes
it possible to interact with the public (businesses, cit-
izens and interest groups) during the drafting process.
3. SYNTAX & SEMANTICS: METALEX
MetaVex is a regulation-drafting environment for Meta-
Lex documents: texts are saved as XML documents that
comply with the MetaLex [3] format for legal sources. This
standard provides a generic and easily extensible framework
for the XML encoding of the structure and contents of legal
documents. It addresses many of the requirements intro-
duced in the previous section, as is described in e.g. [11].
MetaLex is currently undergoing a CEN standardisation
process. It is input to the CEN workshop on an Open
XML interchange format for legal and legislative resources3.
The MetaLex/CEN schema is based on best practices from
amongst others the previous versions of the MetaLex schema,
the Akoma Ntoso schema [10], and the Norme in Rete4
schema. A first version of this schema was adopted as part
of a CEN workshop agreement on 6 December 20065.
A standard interchange format enables public administra-
tions to link legal information from various levels of author-
ity and different countries and languages. Moreover, the
3http://www.cenorm.be/cenorm/businessdomains/
businessdomains/isss/activity/ws metalex.asp
4http://www.nir.it
5See http://www.metalex.eu/wiki/
standard will enable companies that are active in the field
of legal knowledge systems to connect to and use legal con-
tent 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 both citizens and businesses.
As the standard is primarily intended as an interchange
format, a single MetaLex document can contain several ver-
sions of a text. The standard not only includes an event-
based model for managing multiple versions of legal docu-
ments through time [4], multiple language versions of the
same text can also be included in just one MetaLex docu-
ment.
MetaLex provides extensive mechanisms to add metadata
both to specific parts of a document and to the document
as a whole. Every element of a legal text can be uniquely
identified through a URI, and annotated with information
regarding e.g. its version, publication date, validity interval,
efficacy, language, jurisdiction, and authority. Furthermore,
the standard introduces the possibility for marking refer-
ences, both to elements of (other) regulations and to indi-
vidual entities not part of a regulation, such as institutions
or concepts defined by the regulation.
All metadata statements in MetaLex conform to the triple
model of RDF6. This means that any MetaLex metadata can
be used to generate an RDF triple: statements about enti-
ties are interpreted as subject, predicate, object triples. And
conversely, because every MetaLex element has a unique
identifier, it is possible to make external statements in RDF
referring to any element of a legal text. The MetaLex CEN
workshop furthermore adopted the RDFa7 standard for em-
bedded metadata. RDFa does not have its own namespace:
the significance of XML elements and attributes to RDFa
processors is determined entirely by names. An RDFa el-
ement is defined as any XML element that contains one
or more RDFa attributes: about, property, rel, href or
content. An RDFa processor generates RDF triples from
RDFa elements.
This feature of MetaLex provides a strong connection to
other semantic web standards as well, such as RDF Schema
and OWL8 as both have RDF/XML syntax. A MetaLex
document can be translated into OWL by means of XSLT
transformations. OWL provides additional expressive power,
which can be used to describe not only the content or do-
main of a regulation, but also the authority through which
a regulation is enforced, and the history and background of
modifications of the regulation. The MetaLex CEN schema
defines a general framework for describing events and ac-
tions in OWL. More information about this framework can
be found at the MetaLex CEN Wiki9.
More importantly, MetaLex allows formal representations
of legislation to refer to and be grounded in the documents
containing the official texts. An example is LKIF, the Legal
Knowledge Interchange Format [2], currently being devel-
oped in the ESTRELLA project10, a vendor neutral rep-
6The Resource Description Framework. See http://www.
w3.org/RDF/
7http://www.w3.org/2006/07/SWD/RDFa/
8The Web Ontology Language. See http://www.w3.org/
2004/OWL
9See http://www.metalex.eu/wiki/
10ESTRELLA: European project for Standardized Transpar-