XML documents within a legal domain: Standards and tools for the Italian legislative environment

Abstract

The Norme in rete (NIR) [Legislation on the Net] national project aims at making easier the retrieval and the navigation between legal documents in a distributed environment and to encourage the development of systems with characteristics of interoperability and effective of use. In order to obtain this, two standards have been defined: a URN standard, to identify these materials through uniform names, and XML-DTDs to describe legislative documents within the NIR domain. In this paper the definition of such standards and the developments of tools aimed at making easier their adoption are illustrated. Particularly this paper presents a specific law drafting environment, NIREditor, able to produce legal documents and to handle legacy legislative documents according to the NIR standards. © Springer-Verlag 2004.