5. Schema

This document introduces and explains the schemas for AKOMA NTOSO 1.0, an XML-based document format for parliamentary, legislative and judiciary  documents in African Institutions (Pre-Enactment Legislation; Post Enactment Legislation; Parliamentary Debate Record, Parliamentary Order Paper; Miscellaneous Parliamentary Documents; Judgements, etc.).

These Technical Annexes provide details about the AKOMA NTOSO 1.0 document structure and elements and any assumptions made in the development of the schemas are provided, as well as some hints for document markup using this schema.

Global Overview

AKOMANTOSO makes use of two different but connected families of schemas:

• AKOMA NTOSO General Schema: A vocabulary and minimal set of constraints that all AKOMA NTOSO documents must comply to.
• AKOMA NTOSO Detailed Schemas: A set of stricter schemas. They provide more constraints over the same vocabulary of elements to enforce the rules of specific document types in specific African Parliaments. It is a requirement of AKOMA NTOSO that all documents satisfying one of the Detailed Schemas also satisfy the General Schema.

In this document release only the General Schema is described in full. Thus, except when explicitly mentioned, all rules are expected to refer to the General Schema (and thus to all AKOMA NTOSO documents).

AKOMA NTOSO documents are completely qualified, i.e., namespaces are used throughout. Even though some elements use the same name as HTML elements, and in fact are directly drawn out of the HTML vocabulary, out of simplicity it has been decided to use one namespace only, so that all elements are similarly qualified. The net result is that it is possible to specify the AKOMA-NTOSO namespace as the default namespace and have no prefixes in the instance document, while maintaining full qualification of the documents.

The namespace for this release of AKOMA NTOSO is "'http://www.akomantoso.org/1.0'".