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LegalHTML: A Representation Language for Legal Acts

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The Semantic Web (ESWC 2023)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 13870))

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Abstract

The Publications Office (OP) of European Union (EU) expressed the need to simplify the Official Journal production workflow, which required different formats and, consequently, document instances at different stages of the process. We met this need by developing LegalHTML, which unifies the formal, structural and semantic representation of legal acts, as well allowing for diverse typographic requirements for publication. This streamlines the production workflow and publication/fruition of content as well, since a single document instance is first drafted and then incrementally enriched. LegalHTML consists of an extension of HTML for the structural representation of legal acts (e.g., articles, paragraphs, items, and references), while a supplementary ontology enables the annotation (using RDFa) of domain references (e.g., signatories, people and their role in organizations, the scope of the document). LegalHTML also supports the consolidation of an act and its subsequent changes into a single document using a tree-based representation. Finally, we implemented a CSS stylesheet for the default rendering of the model and a JavaScript file imbuing documents with an API that supports TOC generation, footnote cross-references and point-in-time visualization of legal acts.

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Acknowledgements

The authors want to thank by first Willem van Gemert and Maria Westermann for believing in the concept behind LegalHTML and for starting the discussion within the OP. A special acknowledgement to the work of Edyta Posel-Czescik, Camilo Soares and Dominika Uhrikova, for making it real through the end. Last, but surely not the least, we mention the devoted effort of Véronique Parisse who carefully reviewed our work and of all other staff who supported our preliminary investigation (Zilvinas Bubnys, Maria Kardami, Christian Marien and Tamas Schlemmer, among the many).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Enterprise Engineering, University of Rome Tor Vergata, Via del Politecnico 1, 00133, Rome, Italy

    Armando Stellato & Manuel Fiorelli

Authors
  1. Armando Stellato
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  2. Manuel Fiorelli
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Armando Stellato .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal

    Catia Pesquita

  2. University of London, London, UK

    Ernesto Jimenez-Ruiz

  3. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, MI, USA

    Jamie McCusker

  4. Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal

    Daniel Faria

  5. Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Povo, Trento, Italy

    Mauro Dragoni

  6. KU Leuven, Sint-Katelijne-Waver, Belgium

    Anastasia Dimou

  7. EURECOM, Biot, France

    Raphael Troncy

  8. University of Mannheim, Mannheim, Germany

    Sven Hertling

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Stellato, A., Fiorelli, M. (2023). LegalHTML: A Representation Language for Legal Acts. In: Pesquita, C., et al. The Semantic Web. ESWC 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13870. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33455-9_31

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33455-9_31

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-33454-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-33455-9

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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