Legal Informatics and Management of Legislative Documents

This report aims at providing an overview of the state of the art and of the prospects of the application of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in the legislative domain, in particular concerning the management of legislative documents. After a brief introduction on legal informatics, we focus on legislative informatics and identify the challenges it faces nowadays, in the framework of the Internet and the (semantic) Web. We then describe the evolution of the ICT-based management of legislative documents and identify and evaluate the emergent approaches, focusing on those based on open standards. The report is completed by two appendixes: the first reviews initiatives pertaining to the standard-based management of legal sources, the second reviews initiatives pertaining to semantic resources for legislation.