On May 24, the Better Legislation for Smoother Implementation (BLSI) community held its May 2023 BLSI virtual breakfast! This event has focused on gathering the inputs from the community on Law as Code role in digital-ready policymaking, as well as on some implementation examples and tools that can be used for its development.

We express our gratitude to the attendees for their active participation, and interaction with our esteemed speakers, Willy Van Puymbroeck for the LEOS tool, Yann Seimandi, Marina Aguado and Mathias Vanden Auweele for the EU Rail ontology, Veronique Volders and Raf Buyle for the Flanders project, who shared their insightful practical experiences during the webinar.

Here below you can find the key concepts discussed during the various sessions as well as a longer summary of the main content of the webinar.

 

Key takeaways:

• Law as Code (LaC) and Digital-Ready Policymaking (DRP) are synergic in the context of Better Regulation.
• LEOS is an open-source tool supported by the Digital Europe Programme, aiming to facilitate legal drafting by managing the complexity of legislation and policies. It focuses on syntax, semantics, collaboration, transparency, and reducing manual interventions.
• The EU Rail Ontology (ERA) serves as a building block for the Mobility data space, promoting interoperability and facilitating the exchange of information on technical, legal and semantic standards for EU rail networks.
• Flander's Local Council Decisions project enables the sharing of valuable legal information that can now be accessed through an ecosystem built on standards and linked open data. An open-source legal editor supports public servants in interacting with the data, and applications like this one can then provide services for citizens based on municipal regulations (only in Flemish for now).

 

Summary

Law as Code and Digital-Ready Policymaking

• Digital-ready policymaking and Law as Code share common goals of Better Regulation Objectives.
• The community provided valuable inputs on their understanding of Law as Code, underlining the importance of semantics, interpretability, transparency and ethical considerations in LaC applications.

 

The future of LEOS - Legislation Editing Open Software 

• LEOS is a useful resource in the development of Law as Code, as it interfaces the machine-readable representation with the legal drafting. It is supported by the Digital Europe Programme.
• LEOS aims to manage the complexity of drafting legislation and developing policies, in any context. It is a solution initially developed for the EU context where principles like legitimacy, subsidiarity, proportionality need to be respected, but it is applicable to any level of government.
•  The development of the semantic web (Web 3.0) will open other possibilities for the application of digital technologies, such as AI, to lawmaking. LEOS puts the user at the center to enable the digital transformation of legislation.
• Features of LEOS:
  • Open Source
  • Takes care of syntax
  • Collaboration feature
  • A single space containing all information about the act
  • Facilitates transparency and accountability
  • Facilitates interaction between drafting and decision-making workflow reducing manual interventions             
  • Commonly agreed standards enable interoperability with other EU Institutions, as well as Member States
  • LEOS is exploring the integration of a set of AI capabilities into the application in 8 functionalities.

 

 EU Rail Ontology as building block of the EU mobility data space for rail

• The EU Rail Ontology was developed as a building block of the Mobility data space. It facilitates the exchange of information on technical standards for the EU rail networks. The ontology acts as a key enabler for the legal, semantic, and technical interoperability of railways. The steps included in the process were data modeling, vocabulary harmonization and ontology engineering.
• Legacy systems are still a challenge across Member States. We are moving towards SERA (Single European Railway Area), that develops common specifications for the European railway space.
• The EU Agency for Railways is responsible for the modeling of business-to-business data exchange for rails and several challenges arise from having a variety of data models, arising a problem of data integration. It was obtained by leveraging semantic interoperability between existing registers and it allowed for the development of an application that performs route compatibility checks – determining the compatibility of two different rails networks at specific junctions, as well as verifying whether a specific vehicle can move.
• The Railway ontology was included in the new regulation of the railway infrastructure of Europe, Trans European Network – Transport (TEN-T) Regulation (EU) No 1315/2013.
• The railway ontology is available here, while the SPARQL endpoint is available at this link.
• Infrabel contributed to the development of the data infrastructure supporting the ERA Ontology, as well as the development of a client application based on OpenAI API that can be used to query the database in plain English – link.

 

Semantics at your fingertips, Unleashing the power of Local Council Decisions

Accelerating and Affordable Services for Citizens’ Everyday Lives

• Local Council Decisions contain a wealth of information (e.g., conditions of building permits, plan for traffic circulation, tax on business spaces, etc.) which is relevant for governments, for civilians but also for entrepreneurs. Until 2015, a lot of information was locked away in non-transparent archives.
• An ecosystem has been built based on standards and linked open data which makes information accessible to all stakeholders involved.
• Once information is codified as Linked Open Data, it can be integrated into other applications. 
• The ecosystem includes an open-source legal editor that can support the public servants in the interaction with the Linked Data and it can be easily embedded by third-party applications. During the project, reusable templates were built and used to ease decision-making.
• Applications can be built on top, such as this one, where citizens can estimate the taxes on commercial buildings depending on the municipal regulations of different Flemish cities.

 

Presentations and recording 

Download below the webinar presentation – that includes the Q&A too.  

Click here to watch the recording of the session.  

 

The session gave our LIOP team a lot of food for thought to design our future activities. We look forward to seeing you in our next virtual breakfast sessions! 

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