Akoma Ntoso: an XML standard for legislative content

In recent years there have been several intiatives to standardize legislative content. One of the most promising is Akoma Ntoso, an XML standard for parliamentary, legislative and judiciary documents. It provides relatively simple XML elements that capture the structural and semantic properties of the content, in order to make it machine-readable and easily interchangable. Akoma Ntoso was developed in the context of the Africa i-Parliaments Action Plan, an Africa-wide initiative that aims to make African legislative processes more transparent. Its application isn’t restricted to Africa, however: it is currently used by the European Union and considered by the United States Congress.