In this talk we present the Indigo Platform and the open source technology behind it, the challenges encountered developing it, the value that it unlocks for legal experts and the general public.
The Indigo Platform (https://openup.org.za/indigo) is an open source, cloud-based editor that simplifies the process of capturing, consolidating and publishing legislation so that it’s easier to read, work with and understand.
We are using the Indigo Platform to help promote access to the law at the national levels in a number of African countries, and at the municipal level in South Africa. AfricanLII uses the Indigo Platform to enable access to legislation in a growing number countries in Africa, including South Africa, Nigeria, Swaziland and the Seychelles. OpenUp is using the Indigo platform to help South African municipalities provide up-to-date, easy to read and share by-laws to residents, municipal staff and law enforcement.
Indigo can be readily adapted to support local legal traditions. For example, OpenUp recently assisted the ePaństwo Foundation (http://epf.org.pl) with adding support for the Polish legal tradition to Indigo.
The Indigo Platform captures legislation using the open Akoma Ntoso (AKN) XML standard. The legislation is stored in a machine-friendly fashion, allowing Indigo to understand the structure of the legislation. This means that Indigo can instantly format and publish legislation for desktop websites, mobile websites, e-readers (ePUB) and as PDF documents. This machine-friendly format enables new experiences that are not possible when legislation is treated simply as a Word document.
Indigo’s development is highly iterative and follows an agile software development methodology. We conducted extensive consultation with experienced legal editors to both understand the legislation consolidation process, and to identify opportunities to build modern software tooling to improve the process and to find new ways of solving problems. We regularly test Indigo with users that represent a range of editorial and technical skills. Updates and improvements are released daily in response to user feedback.
While Akoma Ntoso underpins the power and flexibility of Indigo, it has also presented challenges. Akoma Ntoso is more rigidly structured than other document standards most users are familiar with, such as HTML and Microsoft Word. We had to make trade-offs to strike a balance between supporting Akoma Ntoso’s rich structural representation, and providing a user-friendly editing interface that is readily customisable to local traditions.
The platform has a user interface that allows for easy interaction with the data, even for legal professionals. Its primary focus, however, is as a back-end application that provides simple APIs that allow Indigo data to be consumed by other applications.
The Indigo Platform embodies a simple notion - machine-readable, metadata-rich and versioned legislation is the accepted standard and best practice in the industry. The core focus of the Platform is productivity - automating data capture from a variety of formats, support for various editorial workflows, functions and production processes, while catering to diverse legal traditions.
Related Session:
October 12th, 2018
Session V.B. Interoperability, Standard and Rules
11:45-13:30
Sala Strozzi of Natural History Museum of the Department of Earth Sciences, University of Florence