Open XML Interchange Format for Legal and Legislative Resources
CEN MetaLex standardizes the way in which sources of law and references to sources of law are to be represented in XML. It was developed by the CEN Workshop on an Open XML Interchange Format for Legal and Legislative Resources (MetaLex).
CEN MetaLex is an interchange format, a lowest common denominator for other standards, intended not to replace jurisdiction-specific standards and vendor-specific formats in the publications process but to impose a standardized view on legal documents for the purposes of information exchange and interoperability in the context of software development.
To meet these requirements, MetaLex defines a mechanism for schema extension, adding metadata, cross referencing, constructing compound documents and a basic naming convention.
Slides on MetaLex at Slideshare
Papers on MetaLex at Google Scholar
The namespace of the XML Schema and OWL Ontology is:
http://www.metalex.eu/metalex/1.0
The CEN workshop on an Open XML interchange format for legal and legislative resources officially started on July 7 2006. The objective of the Workshop was to develop a CEN Workshop Agreement (CWA) on an Open XML interchange format for legal and legislative resources; The CWA was accepted by the CEN and associated standard organisations as a publicly available specification (PAS or pre-norm) for the period of three years, after which the agreement must be renewed or upgraded to a norm.
CEN has a web page dedicated to the workshop. You can use this page to register for the workshop and download the business plan of the workshop.