Akoma Ntoso, the OASIS standard for legal documents, celebrates 20 years. The conference explores AKN global adoption, interoperability, and its strategic role in AI-powered legal technologies.
Date:
Event location: Bologna, Sala Prodi, piazza San Giovanni in Monte 2, Bologna
First Conference of Akoma Ntoso and Call for Contributions/Papers/Demos/Posters
Bologna 21-22 January 2027
OBJECTIVES
Twenty Years of Akoma Ntoso: From Open Standards to AI-Driven Legal Knowledge
Akoma Ntoso is an OASIS XML standard for the semantic representation, annotation, and exchange of parliamentary, legislative, and judicial documents. The initiative was launched in 2006 in Cape Town, with the support of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA). Over the past twenty years, Akoma Ntoso has evolved into the leading international standard for legal and legislative documents and has been adopted by numerous parliaments, governments, courts, and international organisations worldwide.
The forthcoming release of Akoma Ntoso 3.1 marks another significant milestone. The new version introduces important enhancements designed to accommodate a broader range of legal traditions, legislative drafting practices, and multilingual requirements, including support for different calendar systems, right-to-left scripts, and vertical writing systems.
This Call for Papers invites contributions describing the adoption, implementation, and evolution of Akoma Ntoso across the world. We welcome papers presenting best practices, innovative technical architectures, implementation experiences, methodological advances, interoperability solutions, and emerging applications.
Over the past two decades, the role of Akoma Ntoso has continued to evolve. Its earliest applications focused on the digital publication of official gazettes and legal documents, improving public access to legislation. Subsequently, Akoma Ntoso became a cornerstone of the Open Government Data movement, enabling the publication of legal metadata as Linked Open Data and fostering interoperability across legal information systems. More recently, it has been increasingly adopted throughout the legislative lifecycle, supporting legislative drafting, amendment management, version control, and consolidation, managing to improve the overall quality of law-making.
Today, in the era of Artificial Intelligence, Akoma Ntoso has acquired an even more strategic role. Its rich structural and semantic annotations provide authoritative legal knowledge that can be leveraged to build Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems, create knowledge graphs, generate high-quality datasets for fine-tuning large language models, and support vector-based semantic retrieval. AI-enabled applications built upon Akoma Ntoso are increasingly supporting legal drafting, amendment and legislative consolidation, impact assessment, policy design, regulatory monitoring, legislative comparison and the analysis of complex normative systems.
We encourage submissions that explore both established and emerging uses of Akoma Ntoso, demonstrating how open standards continue to drive innovation in legal informatics and how they provide the trusted foundation for the next generation of AI-powered legal technologies.
TOPICS
IMPORTANT DATES
Paper and Demo/Poster submission: October 31st, 2026
Notification of acceptance: November 21st 2026
Camera-ready (Springer LNAI): December 6th 2026
Conference: January 21-22, 2027
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=lekoreai2027
Demo/Poster Papers: 5 pages.
Full Papers: 10 pages in the proceedings
Prepare all submissions in the LNCS-LNAI format
(http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html)
Indicate in the paper whether it is a full paper or demo/poster paper.
Papers will be peer-reviewed by at least three Program Committee members before acceptance for presentation. A second peer review round will be carried out for the additional publication.
The intention is to collect the best papers in a volume to publish in the Springer series “Law, Governance and Technology” https://link.springer.com/series/8808.
The demo papers will have a room where posters/demos can be shown.
University of Bologna Team:
Monica Palmirani
Salvatore Sapienza
Michele Corazza
Victoria Kristan
Chantal Bomprezzi
Pier Francesco Bresciani
Sara Greco
Raul Tiani
