CEN MetaLex: Facilitating Interchange in e-Government

MetaLex is a generic and extensible interchange framework for the XML encoding of the structure of, and metadata about, documents that function as a source of law. It aims to be jurisdiction and language-neutral, and is based on modern XML publishing concepts like a strict separation between text, markup, and metadata, building on top of structure instead of syntax, accommodation of transformation pipelines and standard application programmer interfaces, and integration of Semantic Web standards. In this paper we introduce several important MetaLex concepts, and present the MetaLex approach to standardization of metadata about sources of law, and its integration into the Semantic Web and how this can facilitate e-Government solutions.