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Legislative Open Document Format (LODF)

Data standards are critical components of all enterprise architectures but they are absolutely central to e-Democracy and e-Legislation. Data standards are the primary vehicle through which seamless data interoperability, data interchange and transparency can be achieved whilst at the same time ensuring information longevity and vendor independence.

History has shown over and over again that legislative data standards must be flexible in order to succeed. LODF (Legislative Open Document Format) is the first legislative data standard initiative that fully embraces that reality. LODF integrates legislative document semantics with the ODF XML standard (ISO/IEC 26300:2006). All LODF documents are - by definition - ODF compliant. LODF acts as a layer of extra semantic features layered on top of ODF that capture the salient information regarding legislative document types such as bills, statute, journals etc.

The LODF standard is very flexible, allowing for local modifications to 90% of the semantic layer to meet implementation specific needs. LODF enables the transparent exchange of legislative content across the state, country and the global internet. LODF compliant content can be created, managed, stored and distributed across a variety of applications, platforms, portals, social media, smart devices and the semantic web.