LEX-IS

Today, more than 50% of EU citizens are internet users and all the National Parliaments of Member States have established a web presence. Enabling participation in Governmental decision-making processes via advanced Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has become more important. ICT can e.g. help to cope with the increasing complexity and challenges emerging from the need to provide better information and wider involvement of citizens in governmental decision-making procedures.

The legislation process is usually not supported efficiently, as participation-oriented systems that go beyond the available content management technologies of Parliaments’ web sites and enable the involvement of stakeholders in the legislation formulation and debate processes are not yet present.

Objectives

The overall aim was to improve the legislative process in National Parliaments through enhancing public participation in the preparatory stages with the use of state-of-the-art ICT-tools and methodologies by:

• Modelling the drafting and public consultation process through a role-activity-document ontology
• Implementing the preparatory legislative phases (legislation preparation, debate, draft legislation formation) in workflow management technologies
• Applying advanced ICT-based tools for managing the complex legislative frameworks and legal structures (draft legislation, existing legislation, amendments and changes)
• Developing and modelling legal ontologies and metadata schemas for the semantic annotation of legal elements (directives, laws, decrees), so that all involved parties can easily locate the necessary information with the use of internet-based retrieval tools to enhance legal impact for the public through argument visualization
• Providing means for the actual participation of citizens, businesses and nongovernmental organizations in the preparation and debate phases (public consultation and commenting of draft laws) according to the regulations of each Parliament.

Especially the participation of younger citizens at the legislation proposal stage and in the debate on draft legislation in Parliaments were supported with the LEX-IS platform. It was tested at the Austrian, the Lithuanian, the Hellenic and the Model European Parliament (European Parliament of the Youth).

The University of Koblenz was involved in the requirements gathering, the legal processes definitions, the ontology development (workpackage 1), the platform adaptation in regards to coordinate the adaptations at the Austrian Parliament (workpackage 2), the pilots planning, testing & evaluation (especially to support of the Austrian Parliament) (workpackage 3), and in the dissemination and results' viability activities (workpackage 4).