Advancements in legal interoperability
through LEOS repurposing - the merit of
AKN and Enterprise Integration Patterns
11 September 2021
Summer School LEX2021
by Dr. Fotis Fitsilis
Hellenic Parliament

Structure of presentation
• Motivation
• Interoperability
• Enterprise Integration Patterns (EIPs)
• LEOS repurposing
• Approach, goals and results
• Conclusion and outlook
2

Motivation
• Accessibility and reuse of legal data
• Aggregation of (legal) data leads to BOLD
• Big Open Linked Data
• Challenge:
▫ Generate, handle and analyze
• All you need is standards and tools
• So, what about LEOS and AKN?
3

Interoperability
• What is this?
▫ “Interoperability describes the extent to which systems and devices can
exchange data, and interpret that shared data. For two systems to be
interoperable, they must be able to exchange data and subsequently
present that data such that it can be understood by a user.” (HIMMS)
• Interoperability ‘by design’
• Models and framework (EIF) necessary
• Layered structure
• Legal interoperability on top
• Relies on INSPIRE Directive (2007/2/EC)
4

Interoperability model
5
© EC
“Legal interoperability is about ensuring that organisations operating under
different legal frameworks, policies and strategies are able to work
together.” (revised EIF)

EIPs
• What are EIPs?
▫ Essentially interoperability solutions using
established and advanced messaging technologies
• Established by Hohpe and Woolf (2004)
• Extensive bibliography and practice for development
and evaluation of service-oriented architectures
• Still relevant, e.g. on cloud-native solutions
6

LEOS (Legislation Editing Open Software)
• ISA2 (EC) Action 2016.38 LegIT
• Free, open source tool / modular design
• “…facilitates the editing/reviewing of legislative texts
and generates legislation produced in a format
supporting interoperability between European
institutions” (ISA2)
• Currently in its 3rd release / aggressive development
pipeline
• Scrutinized by the Hellenic OCR Team dev. group
7

LEOS repurposing
• Why repurposing?
▫ Who says that (legal) editors are used only for law-making?
▫ After all, AKN support a multitude of legal docs
• Why LEOS?
▫ Promising yet tested usability for editing legal documents
▫ Document repository based on the Content Management
Interoperability Services (CMIS) open standard  vendor-
neutral way of storing documents and populating them with
pertinent metadata
• Sneak preview: relevant solution to be published soon
8

How to?
• EIP utilization by custom software agents (bots)
• Horizontal scaling
• Processing of (theoretically) indefinite large data
sources
• Independently of data definitions!
• Allows for the design of intelligent, autonomous
agents
9

Demonstrator (basic functionality)
10
LEOS system (©EC) Data repository
(©Hellenic OCR Team)

Approach (schematic)
11
© Leventis et al. (2020, 2021 expected)

XML syntax (fragment)
12
<data>
<field_1>question ID</field_1>
<field_2>type of control: Question</field_2>
<field_3>submission date</field_3>
<field_4>protocol number</field_4>
<field_5>subject</field_5>
<field_6>
<Item>
<ID>MP ID</ID>
<Name>name of MP</Name>
</Item>
</field_6>
<field_7>
<Item>
<Name>name of Ministry</Name>
</Item> … more …
<field_9>
<Item>
<parliamentary group</Name>
</Item>
</field_9>
… more …
</data>

AKN representation (fragment)
13
<preface xml:id="preface">
<container name="logo" xml:id="coverpage__container_1">
<img xml:id="coverpage__container_1__p__img" src="#hellenic_parliament_logo" />
</container>
<container name="docLabel" xml:id="preface__container_1">
<p xml:id="preface__container_1__p">
name of MP <br/>
</p>
<p xml:id="preface__container_2__p">party name</p>
</container>
<container>
<p xml:id="question_to">Προς τ...</p>
<p xml:id="question_to_mp">...</p>
<p xml:id="question_to_mp_ministry">...</p>
</container>
<container>
<p xml:id="question">ΕΡΩΤΗΣΗ</p>
</container>
<p xml:id="question_subject" style="text-align: left;">Θέμα: </p>
</preface>

(Some) results and limitations
• Validation through real-life parliamentary
control data set from the Hellenic Parliament
• Evaluation of interoperability dimension
• Link to Mongo DB backend
• Some of LEOS business logic hardcored (Vaadin v8 web
framework)
• Development milestones Angular frontend
▫ business logic into configuration files, RESTful service
endpoints, expose individual document controllers
14

Conclusion & outlook
• Minimal implementation of a parliamentary question
document template
• Facilitation of the EIP approach
• Publishable as an open source solution
• Essential block to the Hellenic OCR Team’s open
architecture for the digital parliament
• App ecosystem with 3rd party solutions
15

Contact & disclaimer
16
info@hellenicOCRteam.gr
https://hellenicOCRteam.gr
The information and views set out in this
presentation are only those of the author
and do not reflect the official opinion of the
Hellenic Parliament