What is it
AKOMA NTOSO 1.0 Schema
Schema Repository
Issue Tracker
Documentation Glossary
Document Actions
1. Schema for AKOMA NTOSO 1.0
|
AKOMA NTOSO 1.0 Schema
|
This document introduces and explains the schema for AKOMA NTOSO 1.0, an XML-based document format for legislative documents in African countries.
More details about the background and rationale of this project and of the design methodology can be found in the AKOMA NTOSO www.akomantoso.org. The technical schema documentation can be found here http://code.google.com/p/akomantoso/source/browse.
In this document technical details and assumptions about the AKOMA NTOSO 1.0 document structure and elements are provided, as well as some hints for document markup using this schema. The final document describes two different but connected families of schema. The first is the AKOMA NTOSO General Schema, a vocabulary and a minimal set of constraints that all AKOMA NTOSO documents must comply to. A set of stricter schemas, the AKOMA NTOSO Detailed Schemas, provides more constraints over the same vocabulary of elements to enforce the rules of specific document types in specific African countries. It is a requirement of AKOMA NTOSO that all documents satisfying one of the Detailed Schemas also satisfy the General Schema.
In this release only the General Schema is described in full. Thus, except when explicitly mentioned, all rules are expected to refer to the General Schema (and thus to all AKOMA NTOSO documents).
Namespaces
AKOMA NTOSO 1.0 documents are completely qualified, i.e., namespaces are used throughout. Even though some elements use the same name as HTML elements, and in fact are directly drawn out of the HTML vocabulary, out of simplicity it has been decided to use one namespace only, so that all elements are similarly qualified. The net result is that it is possible to specify the AKOMA NTOSO namespace as the default namespace and have no prefixes in the instance document, while maintaining full qualification of the documents.
The namespace for this release of AKOMA NTOSO is “http://www.akomantoso.org/1.0”.
Acknowlegements
The current release of Akoma Ntoso has been heavily influenced by the work of Prof.ssa Monica Palmirani of the University of Bologna, who is credited with the overall organization of the amendment ontology, with the overall overview of the soundness of the language from a legal and legislative point of view, and with the comparative analysis of the legislative documents analyzed for the project.