Namespace Registration for Sources of Law (LEX) Namespace Identifier: lex Version: 1.0 Date: 2022-11-15 Registrant: National Research Council of Italy (CNR) Via de' Barucci, 20 50127 Florence Italy e-mail: lex&ittig.cnr.it phone: +39 055 43995 contact: Enrico Francesconi e-mail: enrico.francesconi&cnr.it Purpose: The purpose of the "lex" namespace is to assign an unequivocal identifier, in well-defined format, to documents that are sources of law. This specification of an unequivocal identifier for legal documents follows a number of initiatives in the field of legal document management. Those initiatives were aimed at introducing standards for sources of law identification and mark-up using URI and XML techniques, respectively (for more details see Section 1.3 of draft-spinosa-urn-lex). The LEX identifier is conceived to be general enough, so as to provide guidance at the core of the specification and sufficient flexibility to cover a wide variety of needs for identifying all the legal documents of different nature, namely legislative, case-law and administrative acts. Moreover, it can be effectively used within a federative environment where different publishers (public and private) can provide their own items of an act (that is there is more than one manifestation of the same act). The LEX identifier is conceived to be: globally unique, transparent, reversible, persistent, location-independent, and language-neutral. It is organized into parts. The first part uses a predetermined standard to specify the country (or more generally the jurisdiction) of origin for the legal document being identified; the remainder is intended for local use in identifying documents issued in that country or jurisdiction. This second part depends only on the system of sources of law identification operating in that nation and it is mainly composed by formalized information related to the enacting authority, the type of measure, the details and possibly the annex. For more details on the nature of the LEX characteristics and the general internal organization, see Section 1.4 of draft-spinosa-urn-lex. The LEX name is linked to the document through specific meta- information, internally (with a tag) or externally (with an attribute); for details on this see Section 1.5 of draft-spinosa-urn-lex. LEX names can be used in references either in (X)HTML document or, more generally, in XML document format (compliant with the DTD/XMLSchema defined in the related country); see Section 1.6 of draft-spinosa-urn-lex for more information. Syntax: The identifier has a hierarchical structure as follows: "urn:lex:" NSS where is the Namespace Specific String composed as follows: NSS = jurisdiction ":" local-name where: is the part providing the identification of the jurisdiction, identifying the scope (state, regional, municipal, supranational or of an organization) where a set of sources of law have validity. It is also possible to represent international organizations (either states or public administrations or private entities). is the uniform name of the source of law in the country or jurisdiction where it is issued; its internal structure is common to the already adopted schemas. It is able to represent all the aspects of an intellectual production, as it is a legal document, from its initial idea, through its evolution during the time, to its realisation by different means (paper, digital, etc.). LEX specifications give information on the internal structure of both and , including specifications about case sensitivity, the use of national characters and diacritics, as well as spaces, connectives, punctuation marks, abbreviations, acronyms, date formats and ordinal numbers. For more details on the internal structure and syntax of the LEX identifier, see Sections 3, 4 and 5 of draft-spinosa-urn-lex. The use of r- and q- components, introduced by RFC 8141, with LEX URNs is not defined in this document. However a LEX URN resolution system can be developed to deal with such components according to the semantics specified in RFC 8141. Assignment: The Jurisdictional Registrar (or those it delegates) of each adhering country or organization is responsible for the definition or acceptance of the uniform name's primary elements (issuing authority and type of legal measure). Any country or jurisdiction, aiming to adopt this schema, identifies a Jurisdictional Registrar, an organization which shares and defines the structure of the optional part of the name, according to the organization of the state or institution. The process of assigning the will be managed by each specific country or jurisdiction under the related element (details on this can be found in Section 7.2 of draft-spinosa-urn-lex). Identifiers in the "lex" namespace are defined through a field assigned to the sources of law of a specific country or organization, and a assigned by the issuing authority. The goal of the LEX schema is to maintain uniqueness and persistence of all resources identified by the assigned URNs. The values of the elements for the LEX identifier within a jurisdiction are defined by the Jurisdictional Registrar. This ensures that the constructed URNs are unique (see Section 7.3 of draft-spinosa-urn-lex for details on uniqueness). The persistence of identifiers depends on the durability of the institutions that assign and administer them (see Section 7.3 of draft-spinosa-urn-lex for details on persistence). Security and Privacy: This document introduces no additional security considerations beyond those associated with the use and resolution of URNs in general. Interoperability: As an openly specified naming convention to identify sources of law at international level, LEX is meant to guarantee interoperability among legal information systems across national boundaries. The characteristics of the LEX naming convention facilitate legal document management as well as providing a mechanism of stable cross-collections and cross-country references, thus allowing the distribution of the legal information towards a federated architecture. Resolution: The resolution service associates a LEX identifier with a specific document address on the internet. The architecture of the resolution service will be organized in two fundamental components: a chain of information in DNS (Domain Name System) and a series of resolution services from URNs to URLs, each competent within a specific domain of the namespace (see Section 8.1 of draft-spinosa-urn-lex for more details). To cope with possible incomplete or inaccurate uniform names, the implementation of a catalogue, based on a relational database, able to associate a URN to related URLs, is suggested, as it will lead to a higher flexibility in the resolution process. A resolver can provide names normalization, completion of inaccurate or incomplete names, and finally their resolution in network locations (see Sections 8.2 and 8.3 of draft-spinosa-urn-lex for characteristics and behaviour of a catalogue for resolution). Documentation: Further information can be found in draft-spinosa-urn-lex at: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-spinosa-urn-lex/ Additional Information: E. Francesconi, "Technologies for European Integration. Standards-based Interoperability of Legal Information Systems", ISBN 978-88-8398-050-3, European Press Academic Publishing, 2007. P.L. Spinosa, "The Assignment of Uniform Names to Italian Legal Documents", URN-NIR 1.4, June, 2010, ITTIG Technical Report n. 8/2010. Revision Information: None