Standardization of Digital Legislative Documents

The paper describes a research in progress analyzing legislative documents handled in the Finnish parliament and government, and studying means for developing standards for the documents. The current document management status in the Finnish parliament and government as well as problems in the management are described. The paper discusses the special features of legislative documents and shows that, as an application area of document standardization, legislative documents are extremely difficult. Because of the difficulties, a major task in the project is to develop suitable methods for the document analysis and standardization. The project has started the development of an analysis method from the basis of an object-oriented method. The initial results of the project are introduced and the future directions are discussed.