Interoperability Framework

Although each Parliament has its unique characteristics, all Parliamentary democracies have a number of characteristics in common: Actors, Structures, Procedures, Acts and Information. AKOMA NTOSO defines common building blocks in a single model that can be applied to each (or at least most) parliamentary, legislative and judiciary documents.

AKOMA NTOSO defines a set of recommendations and guidelines for e-services in a pan-African context. The framework is an essential pre-requisite for  interlinking and web-enabling Parliaments and Courts. It will address information content and recommend technical policies and specifications for connecting  information systems across Africa.

Country Parliaments and Courts should use the guidance provided to supplement their national e-Government Interoperability Frameworks with a pan-African dimension and thus enable pan-African interoperability of Parliaments. AKOMA NTOSO is meant to supplement, rather than replace, national interoperability guidance that may exist by adding the pan-African dimension.

This initiative will enable open access by focussing on both "semantic" and "technical" Interoperability.

• Semantic interoperability is concerned with ensuring that the precise meaning of exchanged information is understandable by any person or application receiving the data. The majority of AKOMA NTOSO's efforts are dedicated to this area.
• Technical interoperability is aimed at ensuring that all AKOMA NTOSO-related applications, systems and interfaces are based on a shared core of technologies, languages and technical assumptions easing data interchange, data access and reuse of acquired competencies and tools. AKOMA NTOSO ensures technical interoperability by enforcing the use of open standards and open document formats, based on the XML (eXtensible Markup Language) language whose specifications are a world-wide standard and for which numerous tools and applications have been developed and are widely available.

By adopting AKOMA NTOSO specifications, parliamentary and court system designers can ensure interoperability between systems while at the same time enjoy the flexibility to select different hardware, and systems and application software to implement solutions.

From presentation to structure and semantics

There are three aspects to any parliamentary, legislative and judiciary document:

1. Presentation - how the information looks e.g. the colour of the text used in the document, the headings and other such formatting issues.;
2. Structure - how the information is organized;
3. Semantics - what the information represents or means;

Online publishing of documents has long been confined to presentation issues. Documents have been put on line trying to replicate as much as possible the layout and formatting of paper. The way a document looks is very important to the "human reader" but do not really provide much useful information to the computer to actually "read" a document as a knowledgeable human being could do.

The development of descriptive markup meta-languages such as XML  allows to add information to any document that would make both the structure and the semantic of a document "readable" by a computer.   Computer do not have the kind of experience and knowledge that allow professional human being to be able to deduct structure and semantics from a document unless this document has been previously "marked up" to make it "machine readable".

More specifically:

• Semantic markup - semantically identifies parts of the document (e.g., headings, names, references, provisions,  In this way the "meaning" of the different parts can then be "understood" by machines as well.
• Structural markup - this refers to the categorizing of different parts of a document based on their functionality e.g. In a parliamentary document you may want to indicate that a certain section of the document is the Preamble, Question, Motions etc.

AKOMA NTOSO provides a way to move digital documents from the presentation era to the semantic one. Digital parliamentary, legislative and judiciary documents will not just be displayed online, they will now be "understood" by software applications. Both the "meaning" and "structure" of every element in a parliamentary, legislative or judiciary document will be available for all machines to access, thus providing the unprecedented opportunity to exploit the speed and accuracy of ICTs to manage, access and distribute such documents.