Semantic Resources for Managing Legislative Information

XML tagging offers the possibility of embedding semantic information in legislative documents, namely, information about the normative content of the legal text [1, 4, 7, 24, 41, 44, 49]. The embedded semantic information can have different levels of depth and can have different articulated structure [3, 7]. At a first level, it only consists of keywords that are added to the text to facilitate the retrieval of it or of its parts [6, 30, 38]. At a second level, it consists of conceptual structures meant to specify the objects of the text and of its parts [7, 12, 21]. At a third level, it may also indicate the entities involved in the regulation and the role they play in it as agents, obligations, etc. [8, 46]. Finally, it may include the formal specification of the rules expressed by the text [3, 7, 8, 46]. Here, we focus only on the first two layers, which are addressed in most of the applications that have been developed so far. In particular, we highlight ways to provide standardised and interoperable semantic tagging and I argue, for that purpose, that it is necessary to rely on existing terminological and semantic resources.