Abstract:

Many countries have provided online access to some types of legislative documents providing thematic as well as keyword or chronological access. Nevertheless, the possibility of consultation of historical versions of the documents is usually an uncommon feature. The dispersion of laws and other legislative documents and their continuous changes make difficult the generation and query of valid legislative information at a given date. Furthermore, the ripple effect of modifications such as updates, insertions or derogations affecting the entire body of a law or part of it are not always visible.

Some issues can be identified related to change management of legislative documents: How to apply the history of changes to a version of a legislative document to obtain a new version, and what type of data model might be better to satisfy temporal queries, to store new versions of documents or to obtain them dynamically. The access to all versions of a document and its fragments is important in legislative queries to be sure which rule was in force to apply when a case happened.

Law documents are produced and archived in information systems with different data models to access and retrieve information about them in a large-scale manner but most of them without law change management functions. Web standards like XML, XSLT and RDF facilitate the separation between content, presentation and metadata, thus contributing to a better annotation and exploitation of information from these documents and their fragments to improve the historical queries and the version generation of legislative documents.

This paper presents a proposal of a data model for storage and retrieval of different versions of legislative document using Linked Data, a method of publishing structured interlinked data, for management of relations between legislative documents and the modification laws. Document structures, modifications, metadata, requirements of historical queries are analyzed in this work. Furthermore, the proposed model facilitates historical queries of legislative documents and consolidation procedures, allowing update relationships between documents and fragments without modification on the original documents. The model has been tested with Ecuadorian laws and could be used for several law systems.

Keywords:

Linked data, digital library, legislative documents.