Discover AKN4EU

Currently, legislation in the European Union involves numerous complex procedures:

• A multitude of institutional actors, requirements, and process chains are involved in the different stages, between proposal and publication, of the legislative process.
• The process is primarily based on Microsoft Word and conducted by IMMC transmissions.
• Drafting legislation includes numerous types of documents, requiring various templates.
• Current processes comprise extensive manual work and could be improved by further automation and reusability.
• The current practice of layout-based drafting lacks validation and automatic quality control features.
• Generally, EU law needs to be accessible and cover all 24 official languages.
• The extensive use of macros depends on their cumbersome maintenance and decreases overall efficiency.

In summary, the legislative processes will benefit from the development and implementation of a structured format for the exchange of legislative documents to enhance ICT efficiency in the field of EU legislation. A structured approach will assure the exploiting of interoperability and standardisation for a seamless exchange of legislative documents.

Standardisation can facilitate the understanding and editing of legislative content for stakeholders such as individuals involved in the drafting of amendments or the translation process. Harmonisation efforts not only facilitate more efficient communication, but also ensure that all parties have timely access to documents and information, enhancing the overall accessibility of EU law.

The standardisation of legal document exchanges via the AKN4EU format is expected to:

• accelerate and improve the quality of drafting, amending, and translating legislation, 
• cut costs by facilitating a structured and automated exchange of legal content,
• increase efficiency and effectiveness by installing a streamlined, seamless procedure,
• upgrade accountability by automating validation,
• enhance simplicity, adaptability, reusability, and security,
• harvest synergies by using an interinstitutional approach, 
• and ultimately, to future-proof legislative formatting in the European Union.

The AKN4EU project is a collaborative interinstitutional effort involving amongst others the European Parliament, the Council of the European Union, the European Commission, the Committee of the Regions, the European Economic and Social Committee, and the Publications Office of the EU.

Since 2018, the Interinstitutional Metadata and Formats Committee (IMFC) is charged with the development and upkeep of the required standards, focusing on legal documents within the ordinary legislative procedure.

While oversight of the project is provided by the IMFC, the Publications Office of the EU is taking the lead in coordinating and assembling participants primarily from each of the three institutions. Given the importance of multilingualism, translation representatives take part in the project, too.

The IMFC’s AKN4EU Coordination Subgroup facilitates the interinstitutional collaboration and harmonisation on the business (Common Vocabulary) and technical level (AKN4EU).

Recently, several EU Member States have signalled interest in the AKN4EU project, reflecting a growing consensus on the importance of a collaborative approach to standardisation in the field of legislative formats and exchange processes.

Akoma Ntoso for EU is poised to become the standardised format for exchanging legislative documents between EU institutions. This format leverages the eXtensible Markup Language (XML), specifically the Akoma Ntoso XML schema. As an OASIS standard, Akoma Ntoso outlines structure, syntax, and semantics, facilitating the exchange of documents that are machine readable. This capability goes beyond mere display purposes, paving the way for more advanced applications.

The definitions required for AKN4EU are carried out by the Formats subgroup of the IMFC on two levels:

• The Common Vocabulary (CoV) which is a collection of structural and logical concepts, extracted from examples of the exchanged documents, reflecting the way users, notably lawyers, translators, proof-readers, or policymakers, refer to the relevant documents and their elements. For each concept, there is a definition and business rule(s). The definitions resolve ambiguity, whereas the business rules specify the correct usage of elements and their hierarchical relations.
• AKN4EU represents the technical specifications for an XML schema to be supported by the tools used in each institution. AKN4EU expresses each CoV concept in form of an XML mark-up conform to the Akoma Ntoso standard maintained by OASIS (in particular OASIS LegalDocML TC) and reflects the business rules defined in the CoV. Since Akoma Ntoso is a rather generic standard, designed to cover a big variety of legal documents, it must be defined how the CoV concepts must be expressed in Akoma Ntoso. Hence, AKN4EU is a customisation of Akoma Ntoso, tailored to the needs of the EU institutions.

The general AKN4EU model is applicable to every document analysed, but also reusable on any further documents. Akoma Ntoso defines a common organization of the documents into Akoma Ntoso files with standardised sections. For each content section, the specification details the AKN4EU rules and content model. The content model guarantees a full use of the ELI URI for referencing the subdivisions of the document at any level of hierarchy and is fully aligned with the CoV structure.

In the current 4.1 version, AKN4EU focuses on the documents pertaining to the Ordinary Legislative Procedure (OLP) and represents the intermediate result of the ongoing work of the IMFC’s Coordination Subgroup for Formats. At this stage, it covers the following document types: Regulation, Directive, Decision; Proposal for a Regulation, Proposal for a Directive, Proposal for a Decision; Some cases of EP Texts Adopted; Council documents including the Position and the Statements of Council reasons. In addition to these documents and beyond the OLP, the document type “International Agreement” is also defined following the same principles. This version of AKN4EU also covers the specification for the .leg package (containing a linguistic variant of a document) and the naming convention for the files inside, the accepted character set including the recommended font.