# On the Future of Legal Publishing Services in the Semantic Web
## 3 The Semantic Web: The Top-Down Model  
The first experiences, aimed at introducing the Semantic Web principles in the legal domain, followed an approach that we can define _top-down_. According to this approach, the semantic enrichment of legal information originates from an intense work of definition and harmonization of standards and vocabularies, to be shared and used to describe the sources of law and favor its interoperability. Several initiatives were launched at national levels. In Italy, for example, the Ministry of Justice, launched in 2001 the \"NormeInRete\" (NIR) project with the aim of creating a distributed architecture, based on document identification standards and content descriptors, with the purpose of creating a single point of access to legal documents equipped with advanced query tools and a stable mechanism for their linking [1]. In this scenario, the project adopted the Web Semantic principles in a top-down approach using URIs for document identification (URN-NIR), as well as XML (XML-NIR) and RDF/OWL standards for representing the structure and the semantics of documents contents. The NormeInRete project was one of the first experiences where the Semantic Web principles were applied to the legal domain, thus becoming an international reference in the field [2]. URN-LEX [3] is the direct international extension of the URN-NIR standard, under approval as the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force ([[http://www.ietf.org](http://www.ietf.org)]([http://www.ietf.org](http://www.ietf.org)))) official standard for legal documents. It is designed to be sufficiently general and flexible to permit the identification of legal documents of various kinds (legislation, case-law and administrative acts) issued in any country or by any authority. One of the main URN-LEX implementations is represented by the publication service of United Kingdom legislation, managed by the UK National Archive. This service uses URN-LEX for back office document management services, while it exposes http-based identifiers following the Linked Open Data principles (see Section 4). One of the pioneer administrations to join the URN model was the Senado Federal do Brazil, that developed a law enforcement service (LexML Brazil) [4] explicitly inspired by NormeInRete, based on the URN-LEX standard for the construction of document identifiers. Similarly, Zotero (Zotero ([[http://www.zotero.org](http://www.zotero.org)]([http://www.zotero.org](http://www.zotero.org)))) developed by [PERSON], Associate Professor at Nagoya University, Japan is a free and open-source service capable of capturing references from documents of legal publishers databases which cooperate with it. Moreover, this service manages references provided directly by users to create reusable libraries in scientific articles according to a user-selected bibliographic style. Zotero's multilingual extension uses the URN-LEX standard, which permits better reference management and increased interoperability with other quotation services. The conceptual model underlying the URN and XML standards in NormeInRete has inspired other legal Semantic Web initiatives at international level, such as the AkomaNtoso project ([[http://www.akomantoso.org](http://www.akomantoso.org)]([http://www.akomantoso.org](http://www.akomantoso.org))) promoted by UNDESA (the United Nations-Department of Economic and Social Affairs) designed to provide document formats and tools to support pan-African parliaments activities. This initiative was followed by the OASIS standardization process producing the so-called LegalDocML standard ([[https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=legaldocml](https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=legaldocml)]([https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=legaldocml](https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=legaldocml))).