Law Making Environment Perspectives

1
Law Making Environment Perspectives
ITTIG - CNR

• C. Biagioli, L. Bacci, E. Francesconi, F. Turchi
• ITTIG-CNR Istituto di Teoria e Tecniche
  dellInformazione Giuridica
• A. Cappelli
• ISTI-CNR Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie
  dellInformazione
• V Legislative XML Workshop
• Fiesole, 14 16 June 2006

2
Overview

• Law-Making Environment
• Tools for the Legislator based on semantic
  models
• Model of Provisions and Arguments
• Software architecture of a module for Planning a
  new bill
• Conclusions.

3
Legislation managementState of the Art

• Upkeep of current legislation through URN and XML
  standards
• This guarantees
• Web accessibility of new and legacy contents
• Interoperability among applications
• Advanced search and retrieval services based on
  semantics
• Automatic consolidation
• The most part of tools dealing with standards for
  legislation are addressed to documentalists
  rather than to the Legislator

4
Purposes

• Providing the Law-Maker with a set of drafting
  tools allowing to plan organic and well structure
  bills
• Strategy
• Ex-ante (Lachmayer) management of the semantics
• Benefits
• planning a new organic bill from a conceptual
  (semantic) point of view
• Metadata are directly inserted by the Legislator
• they will be authentic metadata

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Semantic Model

• Model of Provisions and Arguments
• Amendments (Insertion, Abrogation, Substitution)
• Rules (Obligation, Prohibition, Penalties,
  Exceptions, )
• and their Arguments
• It is a standard within the Norme in Rete
  DTDs/XMLSchema

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NIR-DTD document description

• The NIR standards describe a legislative 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 provisions types and their
  arguments
• It describes the logical structure of a document.

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A fragment of legislative 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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Legislative Document within the NIR environment

• Article 1 (Purposes and definitions)
•  2. For the purposes of this Act
• a) "data bank" shall mean any set of personal
  data,
•  
• Article 7 (Notification)
• 1. A controller intending to process personal
  data falling within the scope of application of
  this Act shall have to notify the Garante thereof
• Article 42 (Amendments to laws in force )
• 2. For paragraph 1 of article 4 of legislative
  decree no. 39 of 12 February 1993 there shall be
  substituted the following1. An Authority for
  information technology in the public
  administration

Definition(definiendum data bank, definiens
any set of personal data)
Obligation(addresseecontroller, action
notification, counter-partyGarante)
Substitution(normurn, novellandoparagraph
1 of article 4, novella )
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LME Tools for Law Makers
URN, XML Standards
tomorrow
today
10
xmLegesEditor
today
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Semantic MarkUp MetaEdit

today
12
Semantic MarkUp MetaEdit
Arguments of the chosen provision type
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Semantic MarkUp MetaEdit

Filling theArgument
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Semantic MarkUp MetaEdit
Semantic markup view
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MetaDrafting LME Project

• Planning
• Aggregation
• Generation.

tomorrow
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Planning basic elements

1. Model of Provisions and Arguments
2. Ontology of concepts and terms of the scenario to
   be regulated
3. Definition manager
4. 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

• Two levels
• 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 the vocabulary 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. Visual Panel

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

File Edit View Insert Options
Help
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Planning visual panel
File Edit View Insert Options
Help
Obligation Addreesee Action
Counter-party
Notification
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Planning 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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Aggregationfrom Provision Instances toGroups
of Partitions
GROUP ProvisionTypes Definition INTO
an Article GROUP ProvisionType Obligation
AND ProvisionType Procedure AND
ProvisionType Derogation WHERE Argument
Action AND content
Notification INTO an Article
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Aggregation
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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Aggregation Criteria Formal and Functional
profiles of a well-structured documents
Capo I

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

Art. 1.

1. DEFINITION
2. DEFINITION
3. DEFINITION

• Well-structured normative documents

Art. 5.
Stuctural partitions

1. OBLIGATION, Arguments X,Y
2. PROCEDURE, Arguments X,Y
3. DEROGATION, Arguments X,Y

contain

semantically
Art. 16
correlated partitions

1. PENALTY
2. PENALTY

according to several criteria
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Semantics StructureDocument
Construction
Formal profile
PartOf
Concrete
Definition
Definition
Functional profile
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XML Skeleton Editor 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
• 1. to be filled
• 2. to be filled
• 3. to be filled

Definition(Controller,)
Definition(Data bank,)
Obligation(Controller,
Notification,Garante)
Procedure(..,Notification, ..)
Derogation(..,Notification, ..)
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Generation

• Aims
• Supporting provision generation
• Features
• Provision text generation on the basis of
• The grammar of a specific provision type
• The content of the arguments

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Grammar of each provision type

• EBNF productions for each type of provisions
• ltProvisionTypegt ? ltDefinitiongt ltCompetencegt
  ltObligationgt
• ltPermissiongt ltProceduregt ltPenaltygt
• 2) ltDefinitiongt ? ltDefinition
  syntactical structuregt
• 3) ltCompetencegt ? ltCompetence syntactical
  structuregt
• ltObligationgt ? ltObligation
  syntactical structuregt
• Each specific syntactical structure is related to
  the structure of the arguments of each provision
  type

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Benefits of Generation

• More clear legislative texts
• It limits the ambiguity of texts
• It helps legislative drafting even for unexpert
  users as regards legislative technique

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XML Partitions Skeleton and Semantics
Generation
XML Text(Structure and Semantics)
Law n. Chapter 1 Art. 1 1. to
be filled 2. to be filled
Chapter 2 Art. 7 1.
to be filled 2. to be filled 3. to be
filled
Law n. Chapter 1 Art. 1 1.
"controller" shall mean any natural or legal
person 2. "data bank" shall mean any
set of personal data
Chapter 2 Art. 7 1. A controller
.. shall have to notify the Garante 2. The
notification shall have to be given in advance
3. Simplified notifications may omit
certain items
Definition(Controller,)
Definition(Controller,)
Definition(Data bank,)
Definition(Data bank,)
Obligation(Controller,Notification,Garante)
Obligation(Controller,Notification,Garante)
Procedure(..,Notification, ..)
Procedure(..,Notification, ..)
Derogation(..,Notification, ..)
Derogation(..,Notification, ..)
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Uses of the Provision Models

• Drafting LawMakingEnvironment
• To provide a semantic guide for planning a new
  bill.
• Consolidation
• Management of amendments
• Searching MetaSearch
• To query a legal information system according to
  a semantic point of view

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metaSearch
Text
Provision types
Arguments
Argument keywords
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metaSearch
Retrieved provisions
Related provisions
Related derogations
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Conclusions

• The LME is aimed at supporting the Law-Maker in
  planning a new bill from a conceptual point of
  view
• The classical process of drafting is reverted
• Traditional drafting
• structure text content semantic markup
  Ex Post
• Meta-draftingsemantic markup
  structure text content
• Ex Ante