URN-based Identification of Legal Acts: The Case of the Italian Senate

• Autore: Enrico Francesconi - Carlo Marchetti - Remigio Pietramala - Pierluigi Spinosa
• Pagine: 233-252

URN-based Identif‌ication of Legal Acts: The Case

of the Italian Senate

ENRI CO FRA NCE SCO NI, CA RLO MA RCHE TTI

REMI GIO PI ETR AMA LA, PI ERLUIG I SPINOSA ∗

SUMM ARY:1. Introduction – 2. Structure of the Identif‌ier – 3. Reference Model

for URN:LEX: the <local-name>Structure – 4. Structure of the URN:LEX <local-

name>– 5. Structure of the Identif‌ier at Work Level – 6. Structure of the URN:LEX

Identif‌ier at Expression Level – 7. Structure of the Identif‌ier at Manifestation Le vel –

8. URN:LEX References – 9. The Resolution Service – 9.1. Catalogues for Resolution

– 9.2. Suggested Resolver Behaviour – 10. URN Standard within the Italian Senate

– 11. A Tool for Automatic Legal References Mark-up within the Italian Senate Web

Site – 12. Conclusions and Future Perspectives

1. INT RODU CTI ON

The growing need of quality and accessibility of legal information forim-

proving transparency and “certainty of law”, as essential pre-condition for

democracy, amplif‌ies the need for interoperability among legal information

systems in national and international setting. A persistent, shared, open

standard identif‌ier for legal documents at international level is the effective

ground to establish such interoperability for the implementation of the Se-

mantic Web concept in the legal domain.

Besides legal content providers, Internet content creators, including pub-

lishers operating well outside the traditional arenas of legal publishing (news,

technical documentation providers, etc.), can benef‌it by this standard be-

cause it facilitates the linking of legal documents and reduces the cost of

information system management and maintenance.

In the last few years a number of initiatives both within and outside Eu-

rope have arisen in the f‌ield of legal document standards to improve legal

document accessibility on the Internet1. In this paper we describe a standard

∗E. Francesconi and P. Spinosa are Researchers at the Institute of Legal Information

Theory and Techniques of the NationalResearch Council of Italy in Florence; C. Marchetti

and R. Pietramala belong to the Senate of the Republic of Italy. E. Francesconi is Author of

Sections 1, 2, 3, 4 and 9; P. Spinosa is Author of Sections 5, 6, 7, 8 and 12; C. Marchetti and

R. Pietramala are Authors of Sections 10 and 11.

1E. FRAN CESC ONI,Technologies for European Integration. Standards-based Interoperabil-

ity of Legal Information Systems, Firenze, European Press AcademicPublishing, 2007, 174 p.

234 Informatica e diritto /Proceedings of the Workshop LOAIT 2010

for the identif‌ication of sources of law, recently submitted to the IETF as In-

ternet Draft2: it is based on a URN technique3capable of scaling beyond

national boundaries as well as on the def‌inition of a namespace convention

(LEX) and a structure that create and manage identif‌iers for sources of law

at international level.

The identif‌iers will be globally unique, transparent, persistent, location-

independent, and language-neutral. These qualities will facilitate legal docu-

ment management, moreover they will provide a mechanism of stable cross-

collections and cross-country references.

In this direction also the Permanent Bureau of the Hague Conference

on Private International Law4has recently expressed its opinion, encourag-

ing EU Member States to adopt “neutral methods of citation of their legal

materials, including methods that are medium-neutral, provider-neutral and

internationally consistent”.

This paper is organized as follows: in Section 2 the general structure of

the URN:LEX identif‌ier is introduced; in Section 3 the FRBR model, which

the URN:LEX schema is based on, is described; in Sections 4, 5, 6 and 7 the

main components of the schema able to identify legal documents at differ-

ent levels of abstraction are shown; in Section 8 the modalities to establish

references to a document or part of it using the URN:LEX methodology

is brief‌ly discussed; in Section 9 the principles of the resolution service are

described; in Sections 10 and 11 a URN:LEX schema national implementa-

tion and a tool for automatic legal references mark-up as used by the Italian

Senate are respectively described. Finally in Section 12 some conclusions

are reported.

2. STRUC TURE O F THE ID ENT IFI ER

As usual, the problem is to provide the right amount guidance at the core

of the standard while providing suff‌icient f‌lexibility to cover a wide variety

2P.SP INOS A, E. FRAN CESC ONI, C. LU PO,A Uniform Resource Name (URN) Namespace

for Sources of Law (LEX), May 2010, http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-spinosa-urn- lex/.

3R. MOATS, K.R. SO LLI NS,URN Syntax, RFC 2141, May 1997; T. BER NERS -LEE, R.

FIEL DING, L. M ASINT ER,Uniform Resource Identif‌iers (URI): Generic Syntax, STD 66, RFC

3986, January 2005; L. DAIG LE, D. VAN GU LIK, R. IA NNE LLA, P. FALTSTRO M,Uniform

Resource Names (URN) Namespace Def‌inition Mechanisms, BCP 66, RFC 3406, October 2002.

4See http://www.hcch.net.