The LexML is a joint initiative of the Civil Law legal system countries seeking to establish

open standard An open standard is a standard that is openly accessible and usable by anyone. It is also a prerequisite to use open license, non-discrimination and extensibility. Typically, anybody can participate in the development. There is no single definition ...

s for the interchange, identification and structuring of legislative and court information, especially official documents. Participated in this initiative are

Germany Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated betwe ...

Brazil Brazil ( pt, Brasil; ), officially the Federative Republic of Brazil (Portuguese: ), is the largest country in both South America and Latin America. At and with over 217 million people, Brazil is the world's fifth-largest country by area ...

Spain , image_flag = Bandera de España.svg , image_coat = Escudo de España (mazonado).svg , national_motto = ''Plus ultra'' (Latin)(English: "Further Beyond") , national_anthem = (English: "Royal March") , i ...

Italy Italy ( it, Italia ), officially the Italian Republic, ) or the Republic of Italy, is a country in Southern Europe. It is located in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, and its territory largely coincides with the homonymous geographical re ...

, through local institutions, with the goal of convergence of national standards and the international standardization of some instruments, such as URN LEX and the use of

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. T ...

formatting standards and the exchange of its metadata. One of the initial goals of the initiative, later abandoned, was the standardization of a single language (called ''LexML'') for marking of legal normative documents of all participating countries. The name "LexML" derives "lex" prefix (Law in Latin) and the acronym ML (English Markup Language) used as a suffix in XML markup languages schemes. Currently only Brazil LexML initiative called "LexML" to its

XML schema An XML schema is a description of a type of Extensible Markup Language, XML document, typically expressed in terms of constraints on the structure and content of documents of that type, above and beyond the basic syntactical constraints imposed ...

. Other former participants migrated to

Akoma Ntoso Akoma Ntoso (''A''rchitecture for ''K''nowledge-''O''riented ''M''anagement of ''A''frican ''N''ormative ''T''exts using ''O''pen ''S''tandards and ''O''ntologies) is an international technical standard for representing executive, legislative and ...

and

EUR-Lex Eur-Lex (stylized EUR-Lex) is an official website of European Union law and other public documents of the European Union (EU), published in 24 official languages of the EU. The Official Journal (OJ) of the European Union is also published on EUR- ...

References

Legal research Online law databases XML {{database-stub