Regardless of the processes that generate and use parliamentary, legislative and judiciary  documents, regardless of the cultural and historical factors that give shape and substance to these documents, and regardless of the human languages in which these documents are written, there are undeniable relationships that connect documents of the same type, of different types, of different countries.

One of the main objectives of AKOMA NTOSO is to be able to capture and describe these similarities so as to unify and streamline, wherever possible and as far as possible, the processes and formats and tools related to parliamentary, legislative and judiciary documentation. This lends itself to reducing investments in tools and systems, helping open access, and enhancing cooperation and integration of governmental bodies both within the individual African countries and between them.

AKOMA NTOSO defines a model for open access focused on the following issues:

1. generation of documents: it should be possible to use the same tools for creating the documents, regardless of the type, country, language, and generation process of the document.
2. presentation of documents: it should be possible to use the same tools to show on screen and print on paper all documents, regardless of their type, country, language and generation process.
3. accessibility of documents: it should be possible to reference and access documents across types, languages, countries, etc., implementing the network of explicit references among texts into a web of hypertext links that allow the reader to navigate easily and immediately across them.
4. description of documents: it should be possible to describe all documents, regardless of their types, languages, countries, etc., so as to make it possible to create repositories, search engines, analysis tools, comparison tools, etc.

At the same time, the AKOMA NTOSO model considers the differences that exist in individual document types, that are derived from using different human languages, and that are implicit in the legislative culture of each country. Therefore the common open access model is designed to be flexible, support exceptions, and allow extensions far enough to provide support for all peculiarities that can be found in the complete document set.

Parliaments and Courts work with a number of distinct types of documents such as legislation, debate record, Parliamentary Questions, Judiciary Proceedings, Judgements etc.

AKOMA NTOSO defines a distinct document type for each major type of document. The definition takes the form of human and machine-readable document models, one for each document type.

All document types share the same basic structures, provide support for metadata, addressing and references, and differentiate common structure and national peculiarities and extensions.

All documents can be produced by the same set of tools (although specialized tools may provide more detailed and specific help in specific situations), need the same tools to be displayed or printed (although specialized tools can provide more sophisticated and individual presentations), can reference each other in an unambiguous and machine-processable way, and can be described by a common set of metadata that helps in indexing, analysing and storing all documents.

Metadata is structured information about a resource. Metadata records information about a document that does not actually belong to it, but is necessary to examine in order to deal with it (for instance, information about its publication, lifecycle, etc.). Metadata also enables a resource to be found by indicating what the resource is about and how it can be accessed. Furthermore, metadata facilitates the discovery and use of online resources by providing information that aids and increases the ease with which information can be located by search engines that index metadata. Metadata values are labelled and collected according to a common ontology, i.e. an organized description of the metadata values that describe the resources.  A common ontology is fundamental to provide a way for managing, organizing and comparing metadata.

The African parliamentary, legislative and judiciary ontology is concerned particularly with records management and resource management, and covers the core set of elements that contain data needed for the effective management and retrieval of official parliamentary, legislative and judiciary  information. The aim of the African parliamentary, legislative and judiciary  ontology is to provide a universal container for all the information about a resource that is available to the owner of the resource, does not belong to the recourse itself, and might be needed for management or searching. Two metadata vocabularies are of foremost importance for the AKOMA NTOSO ontology: the Dublin Core and the Eurovoc-Africa thesaurus. The AKOMA NTOSO ontology provides direct translation of its values into the corresponding Dublin Core properties, and uses systematically values and terms drawn from the Eurovoc-Africa thesaurus.

Yet again, AKOMA NTOSO ontology is designed to be extensible so that those Parliaments and Courts with different, or more specific, metadata needs may add extra elements and qualifiers to meet their own requirements.

The AKOMA NTOSO Naming Convention and the AKOMA NTOSO Reference Mechanism are intended to enable a persistent, location-independent, resource identification mechanism. The adoption of a scheme based on this Naming Convention will allow the full automation of distributed hypertext.

The AKOMA NTOSO reference mechanism, based on a shared naming convention, will allow automated generation of hypertext links and access to resources explicitly cited in AKOMA NTOSO documents. This automation can cater for:

• the availability, at a certain time, of more than one resource corresponding to the document referred to;
• the possibility that references to resources not yet published on the web are present.

Official documents, bills, laws, acts and judgements contain numerous references to other official documents, judgements, bills, laws and acts. The whole parliamentary, legislative and judiciary  corpus of documents can be seen as a network, in which each document is a node linking, and linked by, several other nodes through natural language expressions. The adoption of a common naming convention and a reference mechanism to connect a distributed document corpus, like the one embodied by the African Parliaments and Courts, will greatly enhance the accessibility and richness of cross references. It will enable comprehensive cross referencing and hyper-linking, so vital to any parliamentary, legislative and judiciary  corpus, from:

• debate record into legislation
• section of legislation to section of legislation in the same act
• section of legislation to section of legislation in another act of the same Parliament or of an institution like the Pan African Parliament
• from judgements to other judgements and acts.