OPTML — an open standard for legal documents
We invented OPTML —a way to turn legislation into data.
OPTML is a mark-up language to represent legislation as data. It describes the structure, identity, and content of legislation from any jurisdiction for use in legal research, compliance activities, and other applications.
We take unstructured source documents like acts and regulations and turn them into an OPTML document with explicit structure, identity, and semantics.
Legislation expressed this way makes it easier to build high-value information services and legal and compliance tools. You can also use OPTML to convert your contractual and other obligations into machine readable format.
Publishing in OPTML
Publishing legislation in OPTML is a 5-step process.
You can imagine each step in the pipeline as a station on the line in a factory. Each step serves a specific purpose, making one focused change to add semantic value. By breaking it down in this way we can specialize where needed and generalize where possible.
Step 1 – Crawl
We download the source document from an official source, to ensure accuracy and currency.
Step 2 – Extract
We identify and extract the structure of the document. This step is specific to each jurisdiction to allow for most accurate transformation.
Step 3 – Transform
We transform the document into OPTML. The data is now jurisdiction-agnostic and semantically rich.
Step 4 – Enhance
We enhance the document to uniquely identify each paragraph and link cross-references within and between documents. This allows users to discover linkages and dependencies across many documents.
Step 5 – Publish
We publish the OPTML document to Primacy library. It can now be used to power apps like Primacy OK or incorporated into third party applications.
You can watch a short video here
Next on our roadmap
We’re building tools that will convert your own documents to OPTML so you can create linkages and dependencies between legislation and your own policies and contracts, and use this map of your obligations to drive compliance tasks and operations design. Sign up to our mailing list to stay up to date with the latest developments.
If you would like to know more about the OPTML technology and how it can be used in your business, please contact us at sales@primacy.co
