From E-Parliament Wiki
INTRODUCTION
There is an emerging effort among legislatures to use open standards, such as XML, for the creation and management of parliamentary documents and processes.
Given that Parliaments have to promote the develop of an equitable and inclusive information society, the creation of uniform and sharing standard, (together with the adoption of adequate supportive policies) is essential for this purpose. Only thinking and developing rules and uniform standard, so implementing the new opportunities carrying out by ICT, it will be possible to put in practice concrete e-Parliament results. In fact, in the context created by ICT in terms of information management and global accessibility of information, the need for standardized document formats is not just a desirable practice but a necessity in order to develop information systems that can exploit the unprecedented opportunities of ICT and support the exchange of information and collaboration.
The suggestion of good standards for legislative documents define a set of simple, technology-neutral representations of Parliament documents for e-Parliament services and provide an enabling framework for the effective exchange of “machine readable” parliamentary documents such as bills, legislations, debate records, minutes, committee reports, and so on.
To provide access to legal materials and parliamentary documents it requires that information and data are described and classified in a uniform and organized way so that content is structured in meaningful elements that can be read/understood by software applications. It is said that the content is made “machine readable”.
The opportunity to disclose the structures and semantic components of parliamentary and legislative documents to software applications means to be able to use the huge capacity of ICT to manipulate documents, not as just plain undifferentiated text, but in their structure and semantic components so that high value information services can be developed to assist Institutions and citizens to better play their respective roles.
In conclusions, there is a need to support high level access to parliamentary/legislative (and also judiciaries) documents to foster greater cooperation between different institutions and to use common open standards that avoid vendor lock-in and increase public access to information.
THE ROLE OF LEGAL STANDARD
A standard would define a model for open access focused on the following issues:
- Generation of documents, allowing the use of the same tools for creating the documents regardless of the type, the country, the language and the generation process of the document itself.
- Presentation, allowing the use of the same tools to show on screen and print on paper all documents.
- Accessibility: it should be possible to reference and access documents across types, languages, countries, implementing the network of explicit reference among texts into a web of hypertext links that allow navigating easy and immediately across them.
- Description of documents, allowing the creation of repository, search engines, analysis tools, comparison tools, and so on.
A standard for legislative documents can aim at being shared within a particular national jurisdiction so it can be used by all normative authorities (Parliament, Government, regional Assembly, regulatory bodies, local authorities, etc.) when producing and disseminating documents and by other authorities (like private publishers, citizens, enterprises, etc) when accessing and reusing such documents. This will improve the usability of parliamentary information as a strategic resource both inside and outside Parliaments and leads up value like accountability, effectiveness, efficiency, access, transparency, and so on.
Further increased and additional advantages can be obtained when a standard is shared by different jurisdictions in the framework of international cooperation. Connecting Parliaments have many benefits: they can improve their knowledge, sharing and reusing know-out, best practice, guidelines and any records able to develop new information and knowledge and to improve the role and power of Institutions.
The explosion of Internet-based system have increased the possibility and range of such dialogue but this can be achieved and exploited only if common standards related to the production, classification and sharing of parliamentary and legislative documents are agreed and used by the Parliaments themselves.
The use and share of legal standard for parliamentary activities, is clearly essential for a lot of reasons technological, political and socio-economical.
• Standards foster the interoperability (technological and semantic) of applications. Technological interoperability ensures that all applications, systems and interfaces for e-Parliament services are based on a common set of shared technologies, languages and technical assumptions able to facilitate data interchange, data access and the reuse of acquired competencies and tools. Semantic interoperability, instead, ensures that the precise meaning given to a data or to an information, will be both human and machine readable and understandable. Although each parliament has its unique features, all have a lot of characteristics in common, such like the actors, structures, procedures, documents and information. A good, open and shared standard defines common building blocks in a single model that can be applied to each parliamentary document, on one hand ensuring the interoperability and on the other enjoying the flexibility. So, open standard make it easier to exchange documents between individuals and organizations (in specific, between departments within the Parliament, with another chamber, between Parliament and the Government, with citizen and the civil society, and with legislative bodies and organizations in other countries) even if they use different software for editing and managing documents.
• The use of standards can provide advanced functionalities like point-in-time legislation through standardized representation of data and metadata in the parliamentary domain and mechanisms for citations and cross referencing of legal document. Just because legal documents are highly interrelated, open standard allows links among documents improving the certainty of law and his better knowledge. Further, search engine can provide more accurate results and users can formulate more precise queries if data is tagged for its specific content (look also at semantic web).
• Shared standards make possible to develop a reusable applicative framework and so to have a great flexibility (choice of customization on the base of single preferences and needs) and ability to cooperate: the reuse contributes to increase and enrich the knowledge and the participation, but also to reduce investments in tools and system.
• Standards are able to unify and streamline the processes, formats and tools related to parliamentary documentation so fostering harmonization of methods, procedures, working practices and document model, and promoting cooperation, interoperability, participation, transparency, and so on.
• A standard for parliamentary documents contributes to put in concrete form the citizen’ right to access parliamentary proceedings and legislation: all the parliamentary documents can be available, not only the single final product of legislation (the law) but all the documents inside the process, like bills, Committee report, amendments, memorandum, minutes, and so on. This allows an effective sharing, visibility and accessibility of the whole legislative activities, and so the opportunity to look at all the democratic-legislative procedures carries out inside the Parliament. In particular, improved access to legislative documents and parliamentary activities, will enable citizen to hold Parliaments accountable and transparent (everyone can supervise each steps of the lawmaking process), stimulate greater efficiency, enhance democracy and improve citizen’ trust.
• Standards provide best practices of good governance able to sustain growth and welfare in the global world and increase efficiency in all parliamentary activities.
• Ensure the quality of documents, processes and services. To be more precise, they ensure compliance to a shared and participate level of quality: each actor that share a good standard share also its same good features.
• Finally, they are bearer of democratic values. Transparency of the law-making process, open and free access to all the type of parliamentary documents, adequate and equal opportunity to participate and to understand issues and choices of the legislative process are all democratic values that could be improved by the adoption and the sharing of open standard like XML and are crucial to maintaining an overall sense of legitimacy and civic trust in government. Furthermore, the adoption of good standards (of model, of data, of process, of business), just because bearer of democratic values (transparency, participation, access, accountability, etc.) as we already said, can characterize and qualify a country as democratic, so creating a kind of “quality system”: this is particular the case of developing and emerging countries.