"The drafter" is a member of the office supporting the process of legal drafting, parliamentary proceedings or judgements. During the work-flow phase , "the drafter" receives, for e.g. all proposed text modifications to a bill in discussion that generates any of a number of documents used by members of the Parliaments (such as summaries, synaptic views of amendments, etc.). When the proposed bill is finally approved, he/she creates the final version of the bill; either directly in a XML editor or in a word processing file that is then translated into XML by some downstream process phase. "The drafter' is a subject matter expert in a specific matters e.g law, judgements, etc. , and has some computing experience, but he/she  definitely no computer programmer/scientist. He/she is aware of  AKOMA NTOSO and knows about its structural and semantic requirements but he/she may know very little about XML and "the drafter" will never be exposed or required to know anything about XML but to be very knowledgeable about the structures, semantics and explicit and implicit information the the document he/she is drafting carries..

"The toolmaker" works for a computing firm who has a contract for creating AKOMA NTOSO software for a specific African Parliament and Court. "The toolmaker" decides to create a specialized editing tool by customizing a well-known Word Processor (such as OpenOffice.org or MS Office) and a conversion tools that creates valid AKOMA NTOSO documents recognizing formatting characteristics of the input texts. He/she has the goals of making the tools usable for the "drafter" and his/her colleagues, and at the same time compatible with AKOMA NTOSO rules. Differently from the "drafter", "the toolmaker" has full access to AKOMA NTOSO documentation, and can talk to his users to understand together what each part of AKOMA NTOSO really is relevant to their task and how to proceed.

"The citizen" of an African country where the AKOMA NTOSO system is being used, he/she might be a lawyer, a public employee, an business person or just any ordinary citizen needing fast and easy access to laws legislation or judgements for his/her own purposes. "The citizen's" main objective is searching for laws either through an explicit reference (e.g. "section 36(2)(c)(ii) of Act 2-1999") or via a search interface (either textual or exploiting vocabularies and ontologies specified through the AKOMA NTOSO metadata). "The citizen" doesn't know that AKOMA NTOSO is a project to provide the text of laws, parliamentary proceedings, judgements, etc. to the citizens through some kind of esoteric machinery behind the scenes. He/she does not know what XML is, and does not care. He/she wants his/her web browser to display the text of law searched, he/she wants all explicit references to other laws to be hypertext links, and a reasonable interface that lets his/her read the text on the screen and, when necessary, print it on paper.

"The future toolmaker" is 10 years old now. He/she is playing with his school friends and does not know anything about AKOMA NTOSO and does not care. Yet. He/she is in this list because in fifteen years, when he/she'll be 25, he/she will be a professional computer programmer and will have to create new tools for AKOMA NTOSO. The key difference between "the toolmaker" and "the future toolmaker" is that "the future toolmaker" will not have access to complete documentation. He/she will only have sparse documentation of the actual requirements of the system. Furthermore, he/she will have to deal with a fairly stratified situation where the basic ideas (on which "the toolmaker" has worked) have evolved, modified, expanded and changed emphasis. Furthermore, more often than not these changes have happened slowly and without documentation. The only sure thing that "the future toolmaker" has to work on is more than 15 years of legislation available in XML format, whose documentation is introductory for certain, but far from complete and sufficient. Fortunately the early AKOMA NTOSO decisions have been to have the XML format be as self-explanatory as possible, so that "the future toolmaker" can, in principle, deduce all undocumented facts about AKOMA NTOSO by simply examining a few relevant XML instances of the legislation and discovering there how it should work. In a sense, "the future toolmaker" is more a key user for our system than "the toolmaker", and the possibility for 'the future toolmaker" to deduce fundamental properties of AKOMA NTOSO from the visual examination of XML documents will make us sure of long-term existence and usefulness of the AKOMA NTOSO system itself.