Enrico Francesconi

The processes of political, social and economic integration of European Union member states are causing a growing interest in exchanging legal information knowledge at national and trans-national levels. In this context the use of document standards and Semantic Web technologies represents a pre-condition for the development of services oriented to legislators, to legal information providers as well as to legal experts, with the aim of enhanching the quality and accessibility of legal information in a distributed environment. This work gives an overview of the initiatives on legislative standards at national and European levels, as well as similar trends in extra-European countries, along with technical details of the various activities dealing with the definition of legal standards and the development of software tools for managing legislation.