Open Laws Foundation

An interoperability and provenance layer for the world's legislation.

Most legal-data projects scrape statutes and dump them into a convenient format. That throws away the structure — cross-references, temporal validity, the relationships between acts — which is the part that actually makes legislation useful to machines. We do the opposite.

The Open Laws Foundation does not invent a corpus. It defines the machinery that lets anyone turn their own jurisdiction's already-published legal data into a common, verifiable, interoperable form — and keep it that way over time.

What we are

• A profile of Akoma Ntoso (the OASIS legal-document standard), not a new format. We speak the language the EU, the UN, and national gazettes already speak.
• A set of per-jurisdiction adapters that ingest official sources and emit validated Akoma Ntoso.
• A semantic, type-aware diff for legislation: it tells you what kind of change happened — text amended, entry-into-force changed, cosmetic fix — not just that some bytes moved.
• A conformance suite that defines what "correct" means, so independent contributors stay interoperable without ever talking to each other.

What we are not

• Not another scraped Markdown/PDF corpus.
• Not a replacement for Akoma Ntoso, ELI, or any national system.
• Not (yet) a legal entity. This is an open-source project. We do not solicit or accept donations on behalf of a "foundation" that has not been incorporated.

Repositories

Repo	Purpose	License
spec	The AKN4OLF profile + the conformance suite. Start here.	Apache-2.0
pipeline	Per-jurisdiction adapters and the ingest/validate/publish workflow.	Apache-2.0
diff	The Akoma Ntoso–aware semantic differ and changeset model.	Apache-2.0
archive	The canonical body of legislation, in Akoma Ntoso. Generated, not hand-edited.	CC0-1.0

The one-sentence design rule

Normalize the metadata (identity, time, citations) — never the content. If two lawyers from different countries would argue about how to model it, it stays native. If they agree it exists in both systems, we normalize it.

Status

Early. Building the first two jurisdictions (Italy, France) to prove that one model holds across two legal traditions. If you maintain legal data for a jurisdiction and want it represented here, open an issue in pipeline.