LegalHTML: A Representation Language for Legal Acts

Abstract

The Publications Office (OP) of European Union (EU) expressed the need to simplify the Official Journal production workflow, which required different formats and, consequently, document instances at different stages of the process. We met this need by developing LegalHTML, which unifies the formal, structural and semantic representation of legal acts, as well allowing for diverse typographic requirements for publication. This streamlines the production workflow and publication/fruition of content as well, since a single document instance is first drafted and then incrementally enriched. LegalHTML consists of an extension of HTML for the structural representation of legal acts (e.g., articles, paragraphs, items, and references), while a supplementary ontology enables the annotation (using RDFa) of domain references (e.g., signatories, people and their role in organizations, the scope of the document). LegalHTML also supports the consolidation of an act and its subsequent changes into a single document using a tree-based representation. Finally, we implemented a CSS stylesheet for the default rendering of the model and a JavaScript file imbuing documents with an API that supports TOC generation, footnote cross-references and point-in-time visualization of legal acts.