Specification

The Legal Matter Specification Standard is published by the SALI Alliance as an OWL ontology: a set of concepts, each with a stable identifier, arranged in a hierarchy and connected by typed relationships. The first release worked differently: it was a document format wrapped around a set of flat code lists.

Identifiers

Every tag has one permanent identifier, an IRI, of the form:

http://lmss.sali.org/R8AC0Iq3zua7VGgBd0jCBtz

The trailing segment carries no meaning, and that is the point. A tag can be renamed, redefined, moved under a different parent or given new synonyms, and any system holding the IRI still resolves to the right concept. SALI’s guidance is that released IRIs stay operative indefinitely, and that deprecation, where it happens, is usually consolidation of duplicates rather than deletion.

So store the IRI and render the label. Labels are the part of a tag SALI expects to keep changing.

Structure

The ontology has 24 publishable top-level branches. Each is an ordinary tag that happens to sit at the root, and everything below it is a rdfs:subClassOf descendant. The tree runs up to ten levels deep.

Branches are not a fixed schema. They are subject areas (Area of Law, Industry and Market, Forums and Venues, Governmental Body, Document / Artifact, Location and so on), and SALI adds to them between releases. Browse them all.

Multiple parentage

A tag may have more than one parent, and 821 of them do: a concept that is both a kind of document and a kind of event sits under both. So the LMSS is a directed graph rather than a strict tree, and code that walks it has to cope with a node being reachable by several routes. On this site each tag has one canonical URL and lists every ancestry path it has.

Properties on a tag

Synonyms carry language tags, so altLabel is where translations live: Business Organizations Law also appears as Gesellschaftsrecht, Derecho de Sociedades and 商业组织法. If you are matching free text against the standard, the synonym set is the part that does the work.

Relationships

Beyond the hierarchy, the ontology defines 181 object properties — typed edges between tags such as sali:governedBy, sali:superseded and rdfs:seeAlso. These express things a flat code list cannot: that a proceeding is governed by a particular authority, or that one instrument superseded another. Where a tag has them, they appear in its Relationships section.

Versioning

SALI maintains the ontology on the main branch of sali-legal/LMSS and cuts formal releases periodically. Between releases, main is explicitly provisional — SALI’s own README warns that commits remain subject to public review until a release is cut.

The practical position today is awkward. The only tagged release, v2.0.0, holds 10,489 tags. Current main holds 18,258. Building against the tag would mean building against a standard missing well over a third of itself.

This site therefore renders a pinned commit of main, recorded in the repo and shown in the footer of every page, and treats it as pre-release. The pin only moves through a reviewed pull request that lists exactly which tags were added, removed or renamed. See the API for how to read the version out of the data itself.

Licence

The LMSS is © SALI Alliance, licensed CC BY-ND 4.0. That licence lets anyone share the material, in any medium or format and for any purpose including commercially, as long as it is attributed. What it withholds is the right to distribute an altered version: you cannot publish a changed LMSS or use it to build a competing standard.

Reproducing the standard, as this site does, is squarely what the licence allows.

Two things are worth knowing if you are reusing it yourself. Creative Commons’ own guidance is that changing format alone never creates an adaptation, so publishing the tags as web pages or JSON is not a derivative. And SALI’s GitHub repositories carry an MIT licence, which contradicts the CC BY-ND on their website; this site follows the more restrictive of the two.

Where something here is ours rather than SALI’s, such as the crosswalk or the branch groupings on the home page, it says so.

What happened to LMSS 1.0

The first release, LMSS 1.0 rev. 2, specified an interchange document — a Header and one or more Matter containers, with enumerated values drawn from sixteen flat code sets like SALI-AOL and SALI-COURT. Codes were short mnemonics: LEMP-WGHR for wage and hour law, PLTF for plaintiff.

That model has been superseded. Tags are addressed by IRI, and the interchange question is answered by SALI’s API standard rather than by a document schema. The 1.0 → v3 crosswalk maps the old codes onto current tags, and the original 1.0 rev. 2 specification remains available as a historical document.