MetaLex

Metalex/CEN is a European standard for metadata interchange that describes itself thus:

The CEN workshop on an Open XML interchange format for legal and legislative resources officially started on July 7 2006. The objective of the Workshop is to develop a CEN Workshop Agreement (CWA) on an Open XML interchange format for legal and legislative resources; The CWA is accepted by the CEN and associated standard organisations as a publicly available specification (PAS or pre-norm) for the period of three years, after which the agreement must be renewed or upgraded to a norm.

CEN has a web page dedicated to the workshop. You can use this page to register for the workshop and download the business plan of the workshop.

The standard will enable public administrations to link legal information from various levels of authority and different countries and languages. Moreover, the standard will enable companies that are active in the field of legal knowledge systems to connect to and use legal content in their applications, which allows them to support a much larger market. An open interchange format will also protect customers of such companies from vendor lock in. Finally, the standard will help to improve transparency and accessibility of legal content for citizens and businesses.