1. Challenges to Electronic Publishing of Legislation - Aki Hietanen, Finland
*International Trends
*Re-use of Public Sector Information and Information Sharing
* New Requirements for Electronic Publishing
* The New Dilemma: Abundance of Standards – Lack of Standards

2. Culture Challenges to Electronic Publishing of Legislation Workload
Electronic Legal Publishing
Institutions
data standards
Workload
- variations
Resources
(Staffing, etc.)
Budget
Business
Processes
(lack of best
practices)
data stds.
Performance
data standards
Culture

3. Electronic Publishing of Legislation – the Megatrends
Rapid changes in the technological environment
Unpredictable changes in the market
Changes in the minds of the customers: demanding higher quality and flexible services
Transition from paper to electronic is faster than expected five years ago

4. Electronic Publishing of Legislation– Global Trends in the Information Market
The Legal Globalisation with fewer actors in the global market:
Thomson Inc. owns West Group Inc., developer of the Westlaw legal database (in Europe e.g. Swisslex, Karnov/Denmark, Fakta/Sweden)
Reed Elsevier Inc. owns LexisNexis, FindLaw database, Butterworths, the online legal directory Lawoffice.com and Quicklaw
Wolters Kluwer is the third major actor
Less competition – increasing control over the information market
Changes to be expected in the European market

5. Electronic Publishing of Legislation – European Re-use of Public Information
Directive 2003/98/EU of 17 November 2003 on the re-use of public sector information – until now there has been no review or analysis of the impact of the directive
Economic value of the information market: up to 48 billion euros annually
Re-use of legal information: same information on several websites?
Less serious competition and less innovations?
Somebody should collect the best practices of re-use of legislative information?

6. Barriers to the European Re-use of Public Information (PSI)
Lack of information on available PSI and conditions on re-use and lack of culture of re-use in Member States
Exclusive deals by public sector bodies. PSI should be made available to all potential re-users under similar conditions as laid down in the PSI Directive
Public sector bodies develop commercial activities in parallel with the fulfillment of their public tasks. These commercial activities are in fact sponsored by public funding
Different administration traditions and different rules in Member States
The language factor - the linguistic diversity within the EU
Lack of common standards and metadata
Absence of common principles for storing/archiving and describing information

7. Re-use of Legal Information for the Information Market
No clear rules or principles on the duties and obligations of the government agencies producing legal information
What is the minimum level of services for the re-use? (transfer of data, access to metadata, XML format)
Lack of good practices for re-use of legal information (legislation, case law)

8. Challenge of Cost-Efficiency in Electronic Publishing of Legislation
In the electronic services, some (useful) materials need to be available free-of-charge
Users want databases, not only electronic gazettes
The dilemma of authenticity:
the authentication of electronic documents can be expensive to produce and to maintain
authentic documents are used by a fairly small number of users (examples Austria and France)
The use of electronic signatures: there are several alternatives (basic – advanced, with/without time- stamp, XML/PDF) with different operating costs

9. New Challenges for Electronic Legal Publishing
Single European Information Space - i offering affordable and secure high-bandwidth communications, rich and diverse content and digital services
Web television and mobile services
On-demand services, personalized services: send me the laws on real estates and taxation
LexAlert: getting the latest acts and amendments
Consolidated texts of acts

10. New Requirements for Electronic Publishing of Legislation
Efficiency – predictable, standardized inputs
Quality - correctness
Productivity – outputs from inputs
Timeliness – done by a certain time
Flexibility – legislation boom in the end of the year, difficult to predict the trends
Multiformats – customers want several document formats
Authenticity – the source can be verified
Long-term preservation – laws available in 2057?

11. Competing with the standards
A large number of new documents standards and new acronyms, very close to old standards
Open XML, MS XML
Open Document Format ODF, MS ODF
New PDF versions and PDF/A for archiving
TIFF and new standards for images?
Very few standards on databases, document management or archiving of electronic legislation

12. Competing with the standards
Competition between Open XML – ODF
New developments: Open XML Translator provides tools to build a technical bridge between the Open XML Formats and Open Document Format(ODF). The ODF Add-in for Microsoft Word 2007 allows to Open & Save ODF documents in Word.

13. Contact information
Aki Hietanen, Ministry of Justice, Finland

14. Questions - comments?