A new component for document management improves LEOS, a tool for legislation drafting

The LegIT ISA² action is glad to announce the release of a new component - ISA² Open CMIS Repo - and together with that an upgraded version of LEOS that facilitates drafting of legislative texts.

ISA² Open CMIS Repo is an implementation of the CMIS open standard for document management. It can be used as a backend server for any document or content management application, and provides the basic features needed, such as authentication, ACL management, document creation, filing, etc. It currently implements versions 1.0 and 1.1 of the standard, and is fully functional. It will be adapted to the current version of the standard in the future.

The benefits of ISA² Open CMIS Repo: 

• It provides an easily pluggable solution for content management, solution that deals with the different stages of a document lifecycle such as document creation, storage, versioning, access control, addition of metadata, search/filter and archiving.
• It is based on a well-known standard – OASIS Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) Version 1.0 and 1.1.
• It is released under the European Union Public Licence (EUPL) free of charge

The previous versions of LEOS had OpenCMIS In-Memory Repository, an old implementation of a CMIS repository that holds content and metadata in memory. This was done for testing purpose and it was not meant to be used in production mostly because all data stored in the repository are lost after each restart.

Now, with the latest release LEOS-Pilot 2.1.0, it is also possible to integrate LEOS with ISA² Open CMIS Repo. This provides the persistence needed for a professional production solution.

New version of LEOS in a nutshell

The major improvements in LEOS v2.1.0 are:

• Improved user interface, co-edition icon and alerts, implicit saving while editing;
• Proposal Viewer - a new feature called milestones;
• Improved the ToC edition and the styles for the display of documents (legal text, explanatory memorandum, annex);
• Possible to restore to a previous version for legal text, explanatory memorandum and annex;
• Legal Text Viewer - possible to edit citations and recitals at the unit level, the internal references pattern has changed;
• LEOS configuration: 
  • New roles/actions configuration to ease customisation;
  • Templates configuration improvements;
  • Possibility to support templates that do not have memorandum mandatory by default;
  • Integration with ISA² Open CMIS Repo.
• New services for integration with other systems.
• Technical improvements like the removal of the Kotlin layer and dependencies, refactoring i18 (internationalization) module, bug fixes; and
• Updated dependencies (frameworks and libraries) Ref2link version 1.0.3.

Interested? Try it yourself! Please take into account that some IT knowledge may be required to set up prerequisites and run the demo.

Make sure to have all the prerequisites up and running, download the release, unzip it and run the “run-all.bat” file. For more information on how to run the demo please check the README.txt. 

For more practical information, please check the “LEOS-Pilot_2.1.0.zip\LEOS-Pilot_2.1.0\docs\” folder for the Technical architecture.doc and HOWTO folder and our supporting documents here.

What is LEOS about?

Most people have been involved at some point in time in editing and drafting personal notes, reports and other documents that were usually stored on a local machine. However, imagine the situation when the same document you are drafting and editing requires the input from other colleagues. You can still edit locally and try to consolidate the different versions and feedback, but if you have many colleagues, that would require a lot of work.

Therefore, it could be easier to have an online version you can all work on at the same time. Nothing new so far, but if we are talking about drafting and editing legislation, with complex sets of rules for the structure, while managing versions, comments, things are no longer so easy.

Hence, for the public administrations facing the challenge of drafting legislation, LEOS Pilot offers a solution, under LegIT (2016.38. Legislation Interoperability Tools) Action funded by ISA² Programme, released as open source under EUPL on Joinup.

Get involved!

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You can send your questions or feedback at DIGIT-LEOS-FEEDBACK@ec.europa.eu or submit anonymously.