An e-government information architecture for regulation analysis and compliance assistance

ABSTRACT

The complexity and diversity of government regulations make understanding the regulations a non-trivial task. One of the issues is the existence of multiple sources of regulations and interpretive guides. In this work, we propose an information infrastructure for regulation analysis, which includes a document repository and tools for compliance assistance and similarity analysis. A regulatory repository is developed based on an XML format, and important features, such as concepts and measurements, are extracted using handcrafted rules and a text mining tool. Our framework provides compliance assistance using a reasoning tool based on First Order Predicate Calculus logic, where users are alerted of detected conflicts or otherwise compliance with the regulation. A relatedness analysis is performed by comparing the extracted features as well as structural and referential information from regulations. Examples of an electronic-rulemaking scenario and a compliance checking procedure are shown to demonstrate current capabilities of the prototype system.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.7 DOCUMENT AND TEXT PROCESSING
      I.7.2 Document Preparation
          Subjects: Markup languages

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.1 Content Analysis and Indexing
          Subjects: Linguistic processing

  J. Computer Applications
  J.1 ADMINISTRATIVE DATA PROCESSING

General Terms:
Documentation, Languages, Legal Aspects, Management, Standardization, Theory

Keywords:
compliance check, e-government, e-rulemaking, legal informatics, shallow parsing, similarity analysis, text mining