Folio to XML Conversion

Comment: This mandate is part of the LIMS project.

Project Overview

Converting Canada's Statutes and Regulations (LIMS Project)

• Client: Department of Justice Canada
• Mandate: Converted all consolidated statutes and regulations of Canada, in English and French, from Folio Flat File to XML, in accordance with the DTD provided by the Department of Justice
• Services Provided: Consultation, conversion of existing data
• Technology Used: XML and related technology

Client's Problem

As part of the LIMS project, the Department of Justice of Canada wanted to modernize its statute and regulation management system.

The Department wanted an XML-based system to ensure document consistency, simplify exchanges between different users of the document management system and facilitate cross-media publishing of statutes and regulations.

The Department needed a DTD adapted to the structure of the statutes and regulations. Once the DTD was defined, 568 Canadian consolidated statutes and 3,328 regulations in English and French had to be converted from Folio Flat File to XML format.

Solution

Irosoft, which has over ten years' experience in document management and conversion to and from SGML and XML, was selected by the Department of Justice of Canada to help develop the DTD and convert files.

For this project, Irosoft developed the program and appropriate conversion grammars, and oversaw quality control of the conversion, including back conversion, to ensure that no data were lost. Irosoft also manually made changes to source documents with abnormalities that could not be corrected automatically.