This is a simple introduction to Akoma Ntoso with preference to Acts.

Introduction

Akoma Ntoso (AkN) is an international technical standard for representing executive, legislative and judiciary documents in a structured manner. The documents are in different formats i.e. html, xml, pdfs e.t.c; but with AkN, they are transformed into a standard format which can be stored and consumed by different applications.

Architecture for Knowledge-Oriented Management of African Normative Texts using Open Standards and Ontologies (Akoma Ntoso)

Purpose of Akoma Ntoso

• Create a common document format. Parliament documents, judiciary document etc to end up with a common, understable format.
• Model documents for easy exchange especially between software tools for generation of documents. This ensures common features of documents can be easily transformed.
• Have a schema for document data. This makes it easy to have characteristics of a document easily differentiated. i.e. an Act from a debate document.
• Generation of metadata for documents to enable management of documents i.e. version changes.
• Come up with a mechanism for citation and cross-referencing documents. i.e. a bill mentioned in a debate.