Akoma Ntoso
| Item | Description |
|---|---|
| Current Status | Limited adoption in the US but broader in some other countries |
| Version Number | 3.0 |
| Key Contacts | Prof. Monica Palmirani - email: [email protected] |
| Implementing Agencies | Courts and Parliaments |
| Documentation | http://examples.akomantoso.org/categorical.html |
| Founding/Sponsoring Organizations | United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs |
Background
Parliaments and courts produce large quantities of documents during debates, committee briefs, journals, legislation life cycle and judgments.
Akoma Ntoso defines a set of machine readable data structures (in XML format) of parliamentary, legislative and judiciary documents. The main purposes of this standard are to define a common document format, model for document interchange, data schema, metadata schema and ontology, and schema for citation and cross referencing. This will increase the level of efficiency and accountability in parliamentary and judicial contexts.
Analysis
This data standard empowers the authors of these documents, the citizen analyzing the documents, those drafting and assembling the documents, and the civic hacker who builds solutions around the data. It allows the easy access, interpretation and dissemination of these documents quickly and easily.
Strategic goals include the creation of a common language for the interchange of parliamentary and legislative documents between institutes, facilitation of the long term storage and access of the documents, creation of common data and metadata models for information retrieval and the development of mechanisms for naming and linking documents. Additionally, the intent is for this standard to be both self-explanatory and extensible to allow for modifications within the framework for local customization.