NIREditor developments: support for planning a new bill

1
NIREditor developmentssupport for planning a
new bill
ITTIG - CNR

• Carlo Biagioli, Enrico Francesconi
• ITTIG-CNR Istituto di Teoria e Tecniche
  dellInformazione Giuridica
• Workshop on legislative XML
• Furore, 6 8 April 2005

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Overview

• Overview of NIR standards and NIREditor main
  features
• NIREditor developments
• project of a module to plan a new bill
• Conclusions.

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The NIR standards

• Two specific national work groups produced two
  main official standards
• a standard for cross-referencing legal documents
  with the uniform name (URN) technique
• an unambiguous identifier, allowing the
  references to be expressed in a stabile way,
  independently of document physical location
• a standard for legal document description by
  defining XML-DTDs (NIR-DTDs) of increasing degree
  of complexity.

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Categories of XML-NIR elements

• Structural elements
• heading, preamble, sections, articles,
  paragraphs
• Special elements
• references to other laws, formatted text-embedded
  relevant entities (tables, lists, etc.)
• Metadata

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Kinds of Metadata

• General Metadata
• Subject classification, Publication date
• Relationships among acts.
• Analytical Metadata (Analytical Provisions)
• Amendments (Rules on rules)
• Abrogation, Insertion, Substitution, Derogation
  
• Rules
• Constitutives Definition, Organization,
  Competence, Power
• Regulatives Obligation, Prohibition, Penalties,
  
• and their Arguments

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NIR-DTD document description

• The NIR-DTDs describe a normative text under two
  profiles
• the formal profile
• It considers a law text as made up of divisions
• It describes the physical structure of a
  document
• the functional profile
• It considers a normative text as composed by
  elementary components called provisions (fragment
  of a regulation)
• It is described by analytical provisions
  metadata, and by the arguments of the provisions
• It describes the logical structure of a document.

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A fragment of law text viewed according to the
formaland the functional profile
Functional Profile
Article 7 (Notification)
Type of provision
Obligation Arguments Addressee
Controller Action Notification
Counter-party Garante

• 1. A controller intending to process personal
  data falling within the scope of application of
  this Act shall have to notify the Garante thereof

2. The notification shall have to be given
Formal profile
Division (or Paragraph)
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NIREditor features

• NIREditor a visual law drafting environment able
  to make the adoption of NIR standards easier
• It is able to
• to handle legacy normative documents
• to produce new normative documents
• according to the NIR-DTDs and URN standards,
  using both manual and automatic facilities
• It performs valid operations according to
  NIR-DTDs (no validation is necessary)

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Tools promoting the useof NIR standards
Cross-Reference Parser URN
Structure managers
Structure Parser XML-NIR
Automatic ProvisionClassifier
Semantics managers
Provision ArgumentsExtractor
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NIREditor developments for planning a new bill

• In a normative text, harmony between the formal
  and the functional profiles is desirable
• Facilities to help planning and constructing an
  organic and well-structured normative text
  according to the formal and the functional
  profiles are welcome

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Well-structurednormative texts

• A well-structured normative text can be
  considered as the one where formal profile and
  functional profile tend to overlap.
• Ex
• a formal partition (article) contains paragraphs
  semantically correlated (for example a set
  of provisions of type Definitions)

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Formal and Functional profiles of a
well-structured documents

• A normative text where the functional structure
  fits well the chosen formal structure

Legge 31 Dicembre 1996, n. 675 Tutela delle
persone e di altri soggetti rispetto al
trattamento dei dati personali
Capo I

• Well-structured normative documents

Art. 1.

• DEFINITION
• DEFINITION
• DEFINITION

Stuctural partitions
contain

Capo III
semantically
Art. 16

• PENALTY
• PENALTY

correlated partitions
according to several criteria
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Text Editors (Plain Text, XML) Structure
Semantics

• Legislator is used to draft a new act according
  to a process alternating the insertion of text
  and of formal partitions
• At the end of this drafting process the formal
  structure may not be the best one to express the
  semantics of the text
• Facilities for planning a text according to a
  semantic point of view are desirable

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NIREditor Planning ModuleSemantics
Structure

• Module able to help the drafter at planning a new
  organic bill from a conceptual (semantic) point
  of view
• Firstly the user defines the semantics
  (functional profile) of the new bill
• Then he can construct the best structural
  organization (formal profile) of the text
  following the defined semantics
• NIREditor Planning Module (NIREditorPM) gives
  NIREditor the rank of a Semantic Editor or
  Meta-Editor Biagioli

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NIREditorPM basic elements

• Model of Provisions and Arguments
• Ontology of concepts and terms of the scenario to
  be regulated
• Definition manager
• Visual panel where provisions types and their
  arguments can be handle as visual objects

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1. Model of Provisions and Arguments

• OWL description of the
• provision taxonomy

Provision
subClassOf
ltowlClass rdfIDProvisiongt ltowlClass
rdfIDRegulativegt ltrdfssubClassOf
rdfresource"Provision/gt ltowlClass
rdfIDObligationgt ltrdfssubClassOf
rdfresource"Regulative/gt ltowlClass
rdfIDAddressee/gt ltowlClass
rdfIDAction/gt ltowlClass rdfIDCounter-party
/gt ltowlObjectProperty rdfID"hasAddresseegt
ltrdfsdomain rdfresource"Obligation/gt
ltrdfsrange rdfresource"Addressee/gt
lt/owlObjectPropertygt
Regulative
ObjectProperty
Obligation
hasAddressee
hasCounterParty
hasAction
Addressee
Counter-party
Action
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2. Ontology of concepts and terms of the scenario
to be regulated

• JurWordNet legal semantic lexicon
• Two levels
• Core legal ontology (classes of legal concepts)
• Lexicon (terms as instantiations of legal
  concepts)

• These terms are used to
• provide values to the
• provision arguments.

Legal act
has_hyperonym
Notification
has_hyponym
Notice
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3. Definition Manager

• Specific terms of the domain of interest not
  contained in JurWordNet can be inserted and
  defined using a Definition Manager
• Also these new terms can be used to provide
  values to the provision arguments.

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4. NIREditorPM visual panel

• Panel where to handle
• Provision Types as visual objects
• Provision Arguments whose values are terms from
  the Definition Manager or from JurWordNet

File Edit View Insert Options
Help
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NIREditorPM visual panel
File Edit View Insert Options
Help
Obligation Addreesee Action
Counter-party
Notification
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NIREditorPM visual panel
File Edit View Insert Options
Help
Definition Definiendum Data bank
Definiens
Obligation Addreesee Controller
Action Notification
Counter-party Garante
Derogation Addreesee Action
Notification Counter-party
Procedure Addreesee Action
Notification Counter-party
Definition Definiendum Personal data
Definiens
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NIREditorPM visual panel
File Edit View Insert Options
Help
Paragraph
Definition Definiendum Controller
Definiens
Paragraph
Obligation Addreesee Controller
Action Notification
Counter-party Garante
Paragraph
Definition Definiendum Data bank
Definiens
Paragraph
Procedure Addreesee Action
Notification Counter-party
Article
Paragraph
Derogation Addreesee Action
Notification Counter-party
Article
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Semantics StructureDocument
Construction
Formal profile
Definition
Definition
Functional profile
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XML Export NIREditor view

• lt?xml version"1.0" encoding"iso-8859-1"?gt
• lt!DOCTYPE NIR SYSTEM 'nircompleto.dtd'gt
• ltcapo idcap1gt
• ltdisposizionigt
• ltanalitichegt
• ltdspdefinizionegt
• ltdspdefiniendumgtPersonal dataltdspdefiniendumgt
• lt/dspdefinizionegt
• ltarticolo idart1gt lt/articologt
• lt/capogt
• ltcapo idcap2gt
• ltdisposizionigt
• ltanalitichegt
• ltdspobbligogt

• Law n.
• Chapter 1
• Art. 1
• 1. to be filled
• 2. to be filled
• Chapter 2
• Art. 7
• Obligation(Controller,
• Notification,Garante)
• 1. to be filled
• Procedure(..,Notification, ..)
• 2. to be filled
• Derogation(..,Notification, ..)
• 3. to be filled

Definition(Controller,)
Definition(Data bank,)
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Further Developments

• The user can fill the formal partitions, as well
  as the partition titles, inserting natural
  language formulation of the provisions expressed
  by analytical metadata
• Automatization of this phase by an automatic
  generator of the provision wording, based on NLP
  techniques, using information supported by
  analytical metadata
• This module should be considered as a support of
  the intellectual activity of drafting

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Conclusions

• NIREditorPM module represents a plug-in
  development of NIREditor, aiming at supporting
  the user in planning a new bill
• Using NIREditorPM, the user can plan a new bill
  from a conceptual point of view
• The classical process of drafting is inverted
• from
• Structure Semantics (Text editor
  of plain text or XML)
• to
• Semantics Structure (NIREditor)
• NIREditorPM gives NIREditor the rank of a
  Semantic Editor or Meta-Editor.