image:Lexml portal.png, 300px, www.LexML.gov.br
/big> (search engine)projeto.lexml.gov.br
(project description) LexML Brasil (or ''LexML-BR'' or ''LexML Brazil'') is a project of Brazil's Electronic Government initiative. Its objective is to establish open data systems, integrate work processes and share data, in the context of identifying and structuring

executive Executive ( exe., exec., execu.) may refer to: Role or title * Executive, a senior management role in an organization ** Chief executive officer (CEO), one of the highest-ranking corporate officers (executives) or administrators ** Executive dir ...

legislative A legislature is an assembly with the authority to make laws for a political entity such as a country or city. They are often contrasted with the executive and judicial powers of government. Laws enacted by legislatures are usually known as p ...

and

judiciary The judiciary (also known as the judicial system, judicature, judicial branch, judiciative branch, and court or judiciary system) is the system of courts that adjudicates legal disputes/disagreements and interprets, defends, and applies the law ...

documents. The ''LexML-BR'' standards define a set of simple technology-neutral electronic protocols and representations, based on

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 ...

and

HTTP The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application layer protocol in the Internet protocol suite model for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide Web, ...

ecossistem. While the project was officially launched on June 30, 2009, Brazil has been participating in the

LexML The LexML is a joint initiative of the Civil law (legal system), Civil Law legal system countries seeking to establish open standards for the interchange, identification and structuring of legislative and court information, especially official do ...

community since 2006. In 2009, LexML became an explicit national data standard in the " :pt:e-PING". LexML standards was recommended i
Documento de Referência e-PING v2010
section 10.5, "Areas of Integration for Electronic Government: Technical Specifications". LexML continues to have the status "Adopted" in th
2016 e-PING, Table 16
In May, 2012, Brazil's "Public Access to Information" law (''Lei de Acesso a Informações Públicas'') entered into force, which strengthened the standing of LexML as a transparency tool that could assist in carrying out the obligation to publish government data in the areas of legislative and court documents.

Schema

LexML's

technical standard A technical standard is an established norm or requirement for a repeatable technical task which is applied to a common and repeated use of rules, conditions, guidelines or characteristics for products or related processes and production methods, ...

s allow efficient handling of an enormous quantity of legislative and court information available in

Brasil 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 an ...

. These include: * ''

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 ...

'' of the full text of laws (in accordance wit
LCP-95
. Technical Norm "LexML-BR Part 3". * '' URN Lex schema'',''A Uniform Resource Name (URN) Namespace for Sources of Law (LEX)'', IETF http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-spinosa-urn-lex-04 for reference to and nomenclature of the norms. Technical norm "LexML-BR Parte 2" * ''

OAI-PMH The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) is a protocol developed for harvesting metadata descriptions of records in an archive so that services can be built using metadata from many archives. An implementation of OAI- ...

protocol'' for the exchange and centralization of

metadata Metadata is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including: * Descriptive metadata – the descriptive ...

. Technical norm "LexML-BR Part 4".

Dedicated resources

The main resources needed for the project are already in place: * Permanent URLs (

PURL A persistent uniform resource locator (PURL) is a uniform resource locator (URL) (i.e., location-based uniform resource identifier or URI) that is used to redirect to the location of the requested web resource. PURLs redirect HTTP clients using H ...

) for the URN resolvers: http://www.lexml.gov.br/urn * Website search engine for laws, http://www.lexml.gov.br. Site specialized in laws, decrees, agreements and bills, among other documents at the federal, state and municipal level in all of Brazil. * A toolset for the production and conversion of documents into specified formats.

History

An early development at Brazil occurred at 1997, in a scholar initiative,Alessandra Dorante (1997), "Investigação de processo de conversão automática de textos estruturados para hiperdocumentos"
Dissertação (Mestrado)
with the modeling of the structure of Brazilians legislative documents, and the demonstration that all legislative documents can be automatically translated to HTML hypertext, with intra and inter links. The seminal algorithms (implemented as Perl scripts and

regular expressions A regular expression (shortened as regex or regexp; sometimes referred to as rational expression) is a sequence of characters that specifies a search pattern in text. Usually such patterns are used by string-searching algorithms for "find" or ...

) was lost one decade, rediscovered during the development of an important LexML tool, the ''lexml-linker''. Some scholar studies continued, and served as support to redirect the initial LexML-BR focus on ''XML schemas'' to

and ''URN schemas''. The ''LexML-BR Project'' was started in ~2006, and had the LexML-IT as an antecedent, as well public as consultings. On June 30, 2009, it was launched officially. It is now a joint initiative of many administrative bodies, including Brazil's legislature, executive and judiciary branches, part of th
IT Management Community
which combines the areas of legislative and court information. The goals of the LexML Brazil project can be divided into two main areas: * LexML 1.0: consists of the search engine, resolver service, generation of persistent identifiers and a "link service". * LexML 2.0 (from 2010): wider adoption of open source tools for the production of documents, in accordance with the "LexML Brazil XML Schema".

Motivation

In addition to the legal requirements in Brazil for transparency and publication of government documents (see Motivations), the sheer volume of legislation places a premium on digitization and better public access to digital forms of the law. In 20 years, Brazil has produced approximately: "Quantidade de Normas Editadas no Brasil: Período 05/10/1988 a 05/10/2004", G.L. Amaral e colaboradores. Instituto Brasileiro de Planejamento Tributário (IBPT), Curitiba, Paraná, 2005.
Ver também, dos mesmos autores, "Quantidade de Normas Editadas no Brasil: 20 anos da Constituição Federal de 1988", 2008, disponível em
publicação IBPT 13081/162
* federal laws: 150 thousand, an average of 21 per day. * state laws: 1 million. On average 27 states produce 5 laws per day (135 laws per day total). * municipal laws: 2.6 million laws, on average each of the 5700 municipalities produce 4 laws per week (360 laws per day in total). There has been some research identifying this proliferation of laws and bureaucracy as partly responsible for many economic activities going 'underground'. "Brasil: burocracia e informalidade", A.E. Moraes, 2005. Available i
Correio de Sergipe
/ref>

References

Legal research Online law databases Government databases Government of Brazil

Schema

Dedicated resources

History

Motivation

See also

References