The origins of Akoma Ntoso date back to structuring legislative documents with XML in the early 2000. In Italy, the Norme in Rete project (1999-2015) was one of the first attempts to apply semantic markup to national legislation. At the European level, the CEN MetaLex initiative (2004-2010) provided a standard approach to multinational legal resources in Europe.
Also in 2004 the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA) launched the “Africa i-Parliament Action Plan”, a program aimed at supporting parliamentary institutions in sub-Saharan Africa. As part of this program, a general framework was developed for encoding parliamentary and legislative documents across countries, procedures and legal traditions. The name chosen, Akoma Ntoso, is an Akan expression meaning “linked hearts,” symbolizing understanding and agreement. The variety of the legislative experiences in African parliaments led to extending coverage beyond African parliaments and letting it evolve to a general standard to be applied worldwide for all legal and parliamentary texts.
In 2012 the work was formally brought under the umbrella of the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), where the technical committee named LegalDocML was established. While versions 1.0 and 2.0 date back to the UNDESA period, in 2018 the LegalDocML committee released Akoma Ntoso Version 3.0 as an OASIS Standard, a transition from a pilot-driven initiative to an international specification.