A Federative Approach to Laws Access by Citizens: The “Normeinrete” System

Abstract

The paper presents an e-government project set up in Italy to build the portal “Normeinrete” (i.e. “laws on the net” ). It offers a co-operative information service to citizens providing unified access to Italian and European Union legislation published on different institutional web sites. The system is based on a co-operative technological architecture, resulting in a federation of legislative data bases developed on different platforms. Co-operation is achieved by means of suitable application gateways that provide “loose” integration by adopting two standards to identify the resources and to represent document structure and metadata by XML mark-up according to ad-hoc DTDs. The adoption of these standards allows automatic dynamic hyperlinking among laws and semi-automatic building of legislation in force. The approach adopted allows a good level of integration among different systems while maintaining the autonomy of institutions.