The term akoma ntoso means "linked hearts" in the Akan language of West Africa and for this reason it was selected for nominating this legal XML standard.

The Akoma Ntoso standard defines a set of ‘machine readable’ electronic representations in XML format of the building blocks of parliamentary, legislative and judiciary documents".

It is extensible in order to allow for modifications to address the individual criteria of organizations or unique aspects of various legal practices and languages without sacrificing interoperability with other systems.

Akoma Ntoso allows machine-driven processes to operate on the syntactic and semantic components of digital parliamentary, judicial and legislative documents, thus facilitating the development of high-quality information resources.

Embedded in the environment of the semantic web, it forms the basis for a heterogenous yet interoperable ecosystem, with which these tools can operate and communicate, as well as for future applications and use cases based on digital law or rule representation.

[10] In 2010 European Parliament developed an open source web-based application called AT4AM[11][12] based on Akoma Ntoso[13] for facilitating the production and the management of legislative amendments.

Germany decided to adopt a model-driven development approach to creating and providing a subschema-based application profile in order to ensure interoperability among organizationally independent actors, each with their respective IT landscapes and tools.