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Akoma Ntoso is an XML vocabulary for legal and legislative documents sponsored by the United Nations, initially for African Countries and subsequently for use in other world countries. The XML documents that represent legal and legislative resources in Akoma Ntoso contain a large quantity of elements and sections with concrete semantic information about the correct description and identification of the resource itself and the legal knowledge it contains. Such information is organized in many distinct conceptual layers, allowing for the contribution of different semantic information according to competencies and role in the workflow of the contributor. This paper shows how the Akoma Ntoso standard expresses the independent conceptual layers of semantic information, and provides ontological structures on top of them. We also discuss how current Semantic Web technologies could be used on these layers to reason on the underlying legal texts. As one of the main funding principles of Akoma Ntoso is the long-term preservation of legal documents and of their intended meaning, this paper also shows and justifies some design decisions that have been made in order allow future toolmakers to access the enclosed legal information without having to rely on current technology that may be long forgotten in the future decades.

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This paper presents a mechanism for adding meaningful semantics on top of the CEN Metalex standard, so as to allow the management of heterogeneous legal resources. The results-developed within the Estrella project 2 -envisage the possibility of using CEN Metalex as a neutral document standard in many situations where legal information resources are involved: as an intermediate data format for fostering long-term preservation of legal documents, as a tool for interoperability between legacy systems, as an interchange data format between different application layers, as a conversion mechanism across different versions of the same standard. CEN Metalex also makes it possible to build interesting CMS applications for heterogeneous legal resource information. In order to exploit these potentialities, CEN Metalex needs to be enriched with a legal document ontology and with an intermediate layer called LMIF designed to add semantics to the general structural layer. This paper explains how CEN Metalex can be enriched using LMIF and how to connect this layer with an abstract legal document ontology.