Maria Angela Biasiotti

Legislative XML for the Semantic Web: Principles, Models, Standards for Document Management

This volume examines the basic layers of the standard-based creation and usage of legislation. In particular, it addresses the identification of legislative documents, their structure, the basic metadata and legislative changes. Since mature technologies and established practices are already in place for these layers, a standard-based approach is a necessary aspect of the up-to-date management of legislative resources. Starting out with an overview of the context for the use of XML standards in legislation, the book next examines the rationale of standard-based management of legislative documents. It goes on to address such issues as naming, the Akoma-Ntoso document model, the contribution of standard-based document management to handling legislative dynamics, meta-standards and interchange standards. The volume concludes with a discussion of semantic resources and a reviewon systems and projects.

Learning to Become an E-citizen: The European and Italian Policies

It is almost generally acknowledged that the application of ICTs may represent a strong vehicle for social innovation and progress in the hands of governments, of political representatives and of citizens. So, when the focus is on e-Democracy, which nowadays represents one major strategic approach of ICT applications, it must be interpreted and explored in connection with the more general, traditional and philosophical concept of Democracy. In the World Wide Web context the citizen becomes an e-Citizen: this means that citizens must learn how to turn real citizens of an electronic community and how to use the Internet possibilities in order to become aware of what e-Citizenship implies.

Teaching e-Government in Italy

ICTs have become extraordinary tools employed by State governments for improving the quality, the rapidity and reliability of services provided to private citizens and firms, with the aim, in the long-term, of achieving the goals of the Information Society. The human factor is essential for the structural and organizational development of the labour-intensive world of the public administration. Digital literacy initiatives are, therefore, the major tool for promoting innovation in the various fields of the country’s economic and social life and for moving towards the development of the Information Society, as recognized in various political and legislative documents.

Introduction: Theory and Methodology in Legal Ontology Engineering: Experiences and Future Directions

Ontologies have come of age in the legal field. A certain number of ontologies in different domains are already available and have been used in various applications. However, as a result of the growing of the field, a plurality of theoretical and methodological approaches has flourished. The multi-level complexity involved in legal ontology engineering suggests that there is no single way to address the development of legal ontologies, but rather we have a cluster of problems, perspectives, instruments, and goals that require a plurality of approaches, both on theoretical and on pragmatic grounds. This chapter, after introducing some challenges and new lines of development in the intersection of legal ontologies and next Semantic Web generation, briefly presents the contributions in the volume.

Legal Ontologies: The Linguistic Perspective

“There is a strong relationship/dependence between concepts and their linguistic terms, change on linguistic aspects may affect the intended meaning….” (Avicenna (980–1037 a.c.)) . The paper discusses the approaches to legal ontologies from a linguistic point of view. The starting point is that legal language depends upon the linguistic factor. Legal concepts are partly coming from the ordinary language and partly arising specifically from the legal domain. Both can be identified according to two different approaches:—bottom up and—top down. The attention will be focused on the analysis of the bottom-up approach which: implies two levels of analysis at lexical and ontological level; requires the integration of methodologies and tools in complex and modular architectures generally indicated as ontology learning from texts techniques. The discussion will be based on the assumption that the relationships among meanings are inferred by the analysis of the relationships of the linguistic expressions within texts and the assumption that some logic structures exist, specific for the legal domain, standing below the linguistic expressions of the law. The integration of a theoretical conceptual model with the lexical level extracted from texts allows to respect the contextuality of the law. Therefore, the need to bridge the gap between lexicons and the ontological layer will be underlined focusing on methodologies that can be put in place for integrating these two levels.

Semantic Resources for Managing Legislative Information

The new frontier of the Semantic Web is moving more and more away from information searching of the substantial aspects of documents requiring the availability of advanced editing tools able to handle and manage not only the text but also the semantics of documents. The structuring of legal text in XML offers the opportunity to render legislation not only machine-processable but also machine-understandable, enabling legislative text and its contents to be semantically annotated and conceptually identified by means of semantic mark-up. Starting from this assumption, this chapter is devoted to the analysis of the state of the art of the semantic resources that can be used by information technology as tools for overcoming issues linked with the semantic management of legislative texts.

Converting online public legal information into knowledge: "ABC del Diritto" an Italian e-Government citizen-oriented service

e-Government is the use of information and communication technologies in public administration - combined with organisational change and new skills - to improve public services and democratic processes and to strengthen support to public policies. e-Government is a way for public administration to become more open and transparent, and to reinforce democratic participation; more service-oriented, providing personalised and inclusive services to each citizen.