Akoma Ntoso

Akoma Ntoso (Architecture for Knowledge-Oriented Management of African Normative Texts using Open Standards and Ontologies) is an international technical standard for representing executive, legislative and judiciary documents in a structured manner. It is a legal XML vocabulary and it suggests also a naming convention for providing unique identifier to legal sources based on FRBR model.

The term akoma ntoso means "linked hearts" in the Akan language of West Africa and for this reason it was selected for nominating this legal XML standard. The usual acronym is AKN, to designate the XML AKN format.

Akoma Ntoso started as an UNDESA project within the “Strengthening Parliaments’ Information Systems in Africa” and the core vocabulary was created mostly by two professors from University of Bologna. Later it became the main work package of the activities of the LegalDocML Technical Committee within OASIS. The Akoma Ntoso XML schema standard “defines a ‘machine readable’ set of simple technology-neutral electronic representations (in XML format) of parliamentary, legislative and judiciary documents”.

Akoma Ntoso is constituted by an XML document schema providing sophisticated description possibilities for several parliamentary, legislative and judiciary document types (including bills, acts and parliamentary records, judgments, gazette, etc.). The work provided the basis for the OASIS Legal XML LegalDocumentML project.

In 2010 European Parliament developed an open source tool (AT4AM) based on Akoma Ntoso for facilitating the production and the management of amendments. Thanks to this project EU Parliament extended the application to Akoma Ntoso to other documents (e.g., proposal, transcript) and to other scenarios (e.g., translation process).

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