Open Access

Interoperability

Although each Parliament and court system has its unique characteristics, all parliamentary democracies have a number of characteristics in common: Actors, Structures, Procedures, Acts and Information Processes are in many ways comparable. AKOMA NTOSO defines common building blocks for these concepts in a single model that can be applied to all (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. This framework is an essential prerequisite for interlinking and web-enabling Parliaments and Courts. It addresses information content and recommends 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 guidelines that may exist in loco by adding to them a pan-African dimension.

This initiative enables open access to information by focussing on both “semantic” and “technical” interoperability at the document level.

• 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, all of whom are 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.

Presentation,Structure and Semantics

There are four aspects to any document that are relevant to mention, and this is also true for parliamentary, legislative and judiciary documents:

1. Content – the actual set of words and punctuation that form the sentences of the text;
2. Presentation - how the information looks, e.g. the colour of the text used in the document, the font used in the headings and other such formatting issues;
3. Structure - how the information is organized, e.g., the identification of some parts of text as headings, some parts as clauses, etc.;
4. 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 does not really provide much useful information to the computer to actually “use” a document the way 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 semantics of a document “usable” by a computer. Computers 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:

• Structural markup – refers to the categorizing of different parts of a text based on their role in organizing the document (e.g., sections and clauses, preambles and attachments, headings and bodies, etc.)
• Semantic markup – refers to the categorizing of different parts of a text based on their meaning with regard to the topic of the document (e.g., provisions, definitions, reference, names, dates, places, etc.) Sometimes structural and semantic markup overlap, e.g. in a parliamentary document a Question or a Motion is both a specfic structure within the document, as well as a semantic indication of the content that will be found therein.

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