{"id":1968,"date":"2011-10-25T08:50:15","date_gmt":"2011-10-25T13:50:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/voxpop\/?p=1968"},"modified":"2011-11-01T08:34:31","modified_gmt":"2011-11-01T13:34:31","slug":"the-metalex-document-server","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/voxpop\/2011\/10\/25\/the-metalex-document-server\/","title":{"rendered":"The MetaLex Document Server"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Dutch<\/a>In this post I describe the process and requirements that eventually led to the\u00a0MetaLex Document Server<\/a>, a server that hosts all versions of Dutch national statutes and regulations published since May 2011, both as\u00a0CEN MetaLex<\/a>, and as\u00a0Linked Data<\/a>. Before I set out to do so, however, I would like to emphasize that, although the development of the server and its contents was a one-man-job, the road to make it possible surely was not solitary. A couple of people I’d like to mention here are Alexander Boer<\/a>, Radboud Winkels<\/a>, and Tom van Engers<\/a> of the Leibniz Center for Law<\/a>, together with whom I have worked over the past ten years to develop, test, and publish the ideas that underlie CEN MetaLex. Also, the team around\u00a0legislation.gov.uk<\/a> clearly has done a lot of great and inspiring\u00a0 work in this area.<\/p>\n

So, what happened? Over the course of last spring, I was involved in several small-scale projects that shared a specific need: version-aware identifiers for all parts of legislative texts. \u00a0The first of these was a report for the\u00a0Swiss Federal Chancellery<\/a> on possible technological solutions for a regulation drafting system to be used by the Swiss government. Second to arrive on my desk was a project for the\u00a0Dutch Tax and Customs Administration (Belastingdienst),<\/a> in which we were asked to develop a concept-extraction toolkit that would allow them to make explicit where concepts are defined, where they are reused, and how they relate to other concepts (e.g.<\/em>, from an external thesaurus). The purpose of this project was to investigate whether we could replace with technology what is currently a manual process of turning legislation into business processes that fuel citizen- and business-oriented services. The Belastingdienst needs this to better cope with the yearly changes to tax regulation issued by the\u00a0Ministry of Finance<\/a>. The\u00a0Dutch Immigration and Naturalisation Service (IND)<\/a> faces exactly the same problem: of discovering what part of their business processes is affected by each legislative modification. Updates to legislation require continuous, significant investment in IT re-engineering.<\/p>\n

\"Model<\/a><\/p>\n

The root of the problem<\/strong><\/h3>\n

But don’t modern European governments already have elaborate facilities for supporting this workflow? I’m afraid not.<\/p>\n

Currently, regulation drafting is a process of sending around Word documents, copy-and-pasting from older texts, “version hell,” signing by a Minister, and sending the enacted regulations off to a publisher, who will then turn it into some XML format to feed a publishing platform to generate HTML, PDF, and paper versions of the texts. This process is not designed with a content management perspective, and most if not all metadata is thrown away in the process.<\/p>\n

Part of the problem is one of\u00a0organisational change<\/em>: convincing legislative drafters to use a more structured approach in their daily work. The\u00a0Dutch Ministry of Security and Justice<\/a> is currently developing a legislative editing environment (similar to the\u00a0MetaVex<\/a> editor developed at the\u00a0University of Amsterdam<\/a>), but it will take awhile before this is adopted in practice.<\/p>\n

Requirements<\/strong><\/h3>\n

To develop a chain of tools for managing legal information, both as text and as knowledge models, we need to address a number of key requirements:<\/p>\n