1. What is it

AKOMA NTOSO - Architecture for Knowledge-Oriented Management of African Normative Texts using Open Standards and Ontologies defines a set of simple, technology-neutral representations of parliamentary documents for e-services in a Pan-African context and provides an enabling framework for the effective exchange of "machine readable" parliamentary, legislative and judiciary documents such as legislation, debate record, minutes, etc.

Providing access to primary legal materials, parliamentary works and judiciaries documents is not just a matter of giving physical or on-line access to them. "Open access" requires the information to be described and classified in a uniform and organized way so that content is structured into meaningful elements that can be read/understood by software applications, so that the content is made "machine readable".

The opportunity to make accessible the structures and semantic components of parliamentary, legislative and judiciaries documents to software applications means to be able to available the huge capacity of ICTs to manipulate documents not as just plain undifferentiated text but in their structure and semantic component so that high value information services can be developed to assist both institutions and citizens to better play their respective roles.

AKOMA NTOSO fulfils the citizens' right to access parliamentary and judiciary proceedings and legislation by providing "open access" and advanced functionalities like "point-in-time" legislation through standardised representations of data and metadata in the African Parliamentary domain and mechanism for citation and cross referencing of legal documents to also improve data exchange and document life cycle automation.

The AKOMANTOSO logo is a combination of two symbols:

1. Linked Hearts -  a symbol used by the Akan people of West Africa to represent understanding and agreement;
2. The African continent - to indicate the regional focus of AKOMA NTOSO

Placing the 'linked hearts' over the African continent is a symbolic representation of the Akomantoso goal: "To provide open access to parliamentary documentation and allow African parliaments to exchange information efficiently promoting understanding and collaboration".