Legal Change Management with a Native XML Repository

This paper presents a solution for managing heterogeneous legal XML resources using a native XML repository—called eXistrella—designed to enable a common query layer within a temporal environment equipped to manage the evolution of legislative documents over time. With eXistrella, the structure of a legal document is directly connected with the legal knowledge embedded in the corresponding norms, exploiting the XML syntax used in modeling such norms, and in this way, the gap can be bridged between the container (the document) and the way the content (the norm) is modeled.