Legislative Change Management with Akoma-Ntoso

The dynamicity of the law enables legislative texts to adapt to changes in society, as well as to correct iniquities and to effectively set out rights and duties. In the Web 2.0 era, an overabundance of obsolete legal information can be disorienting, not only for the citizen but also for enterprises and for government agencies tasked with making enforceable decisions. The goal of legal-information systems, legal databanks, and recently the collections of legal documents on the Web is thus to provide pertinent and updated legal information to legal experts and citizens alike, this in a dynamic scenario and possibly with semantic annotation explaining outcomes. In this chapter we explain how Akoma Ntoso provides an exhaustive mechanism for managing the changes a legal system undergoes over time and in multiple scenarios. To this end, we start out by looking at the different kinds of changes involved and defining them. We analyse the components of change in depth and provide a classification for qualifying the provisions found in a legal text. Then we introduce some methods for managing the different types of change identified. And finally, we explain how such changes are managed in Akoma Ntoso.