Using XML technologies for modeling and searching legislative acts.

A case study: managing brazilian acts.

V Legislative XML Workshop14-16 June 2006 - San Domenico di Fiesole (Florence - Italy)

Andrea Marchetti, Isabela Martins Garcia Leite, Maurizio Tesconi, Salvatore Minutoli

Overview

• A schema for Brazilian legislative acts– from a thesis of Isabela Martins Garcia Leite

• Presentations of XML technologies for modelling, trasforming and searching– with a demo

I regret but

• Thinking in italian• Speaking in english• Reading in portuguese Chaos

Brazilian schema

• Thesis realized in 2002/2003– Is it necessary some updating?

• Drafting Rules from 3 sources– Lei Complementar 95/1998– Decreto n. 4.176/2002

– Manual de redação da Presidência da República • Influence of NIR experience

Lei Complementar 95/1998• Main source for drafting rules• It defines the rules of:

– authoring (formal, formatting, functional)– alteration– consolidation

• For the following kind of acts – Emenda à Constituição, – Lei Complementar, – Lei Ordinária, – Decreto Legislativo, – Lei Delegada– Medida Provisória– Decreto – os atos de regulamentação expedidos pelos orgãos do Executivo

Federal

Preliminar

Normativa

Final

Formal structure of Brazilian Law

The “Preliminar” Part

ementa

epigrafe

preambulo

objectoAmbitoDeAplicacao

The “normativa” partartigo

numero

caput

paragrafoUnico

artigo

caput

numero

The “normativa” part

• Organization of “artigo” elements

Brazilian schema Italian schema

The “final” partvigencia

fechoassinatura

lugar, data, anoDaIndipendencia, anoDaRepubblica

Schema

Schema

• A light schema (only 40 elements)• Adoption of the drafting rules strictly• We will study the markup for managing

law alteration

Formatting rules lei Complementar 95/1998

• parte, livro, titulo, capitulo uppercase name + roman number (parti espresse in numerale ordinale per esteso ???).

• seçao, subseçao lowercase bold name + roman numbers

Formatting Rules lei Complementar 95/1998

• artigo abbreviation “Art.”, + ordinal number until 9th and cardinal number from 10th

Formatting Rules lei Complementar 95/1998

• paragrafo graphic symbol “§”, + ordinal number untill 9 and cardinal number from 9. When there is only one paragraph it is used the expression “paragrafo unico”

Formatting Rules lei Complementar 95/1998

• Inciso roman numbers.• Alinea small letter .• Iten arabic number

Functional rules lei Complementar 95/1998

• Clearness– popular words/expressions, short sentences, use the same

tense especially present and future tense, avoiding stylistic excesses

• Preciseness– use the same words to express keywords, avoid synonims and

ambigous words, avoid regional expressions, no acronyms, …• Logical Order

– only sentences regarding the object of the law • Alteration

– to insert a new artigo you must repeat the number plus a capital letter

– ex Art. 2°-A.

II Part

• Demo of XML Tools and Technologies

XQuery• Mix of SQL + XPATH + Text retrivial functions• XQuery allows to use functions such as near,

match into the range of XML elements selected with xpath espressions.

• FLOWR expression– FOR $act in //norma– LET $epigrafe:=$act//epigrafe– ORDER BY $epigrafe//numero– WHERE $epigrafe//numero > ‘10.000’– RETURN $act

XML Native Database

• XML for legislative acts. And Now?• Looking for Native XML databases

http://www.rpbourret.com/xml/ProdsNative.htm • eXist

eXist

• eXist exist.sourceforge.net/

– open source– XQuery 1.0 support

• W3C Candidate Recommendation 8 June 2006• http://www.w3.org/XML/Query/

• demo of eXist/XQuery capabilities