C. Biagioli, E. Francesconi, G. Sartor (eds.),
Proceedings of the V Legislative XML Workshop,
European Press Academic Publishing (EPAP), 2007

Widespread and shared access to legal information can significantly contribute to European integration. This objective requires the adoption of common or interoperable standards for legal documents and related information, inorder to enhance cross-border exchanges, promote interoperability among applications, and permit communication between legal information systems. Moreover, standardization can improve the quality of legal contents and facilitate the delivery of high quality integrated services, all over Europe.

In the last few years many national projects have been launched on standards for legislative texts, with the purpose of overcoming the fragmentation of legal information within national systems, as well as to contribute to legal certainty and improve the quality of legislation. Recently the experiences of
several national projects (as NIR in Italy, Metalex in the Netherlands, LexDania in Denmark, CHLeXML in Switzerland and eLaw in Austria) have been presented and compared in the ''Legislative XML Workshops'' held in Macolin (CH), Kobaek-Strand (DK), Furore (IT) and Klagenfurt (AT). Now the time has come to promote a common initiative aimed at proposing European standards for legislation.

Our workshop continues the series of the legislative XML workshops, and likewise aims at involving experts from all the European countries and European institutions which are developing, or aim to develop projects for standards in legislation.

As in the previous editions, the main focus of our workshop is on the presentation, comparison and discussion of concrete experiences and projects, especially those carried out by public administrations, with the purpose of sharing knowledge and best practices. For this purpose we shall organise the comparison of the results obtained by marking the same legislative text according to different national standards.

However, this workshop also has one further specific objective, namely considering the European dimension, and proposing ideas for a roadmap towards common and interoperable standards.
In particular this workshop is expecting to define a roadmap leading to the submission of a project proposal on European standards for legislation, to be submitted to the next call of the program framework for EU-projects.