On the Need for Standard Document Formats for eGovernance Applications of Legal Knowledge-Based Systems

eGovernance is the use of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) to support the entire life cycle of law, regulations and other norms. Legal Knowledge-Based Systems have a great deal of potential in this application domain. Although a number of products for developing and using legal knowledge-based systems have been successfully used in deployed applications, the growth of the eGovernance market is inhibited by the lack appropriate industry standards. Starting from a process model for eGovernance, a number of document types required for egovernance applications of legal knowledge-based systems have been identified. Relevant existing or emerging document standards, such as MetaLex, RuleML and OWL, are assessed with regard to their suitability for use in this domain. 1. The eGovernance Market eGovernance is the use of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) to support the entire life cycle of law, regulations and other norms [Reinermann 2002]. eGovernance is related to eGovernment, but has a different focus. Whereas eGovernment focuses on the use of ICT to support all the tasks of public adminstration, eGovernance applies ICT to support all actors involved in the production and use of norms. Figure 1 shows the big governance picture, the life cycle of legislation, and elaborates on the diagram of [Macintosh 2003]. This is a kind of cybernetic control loop consisting of the following tasks or phases: agenda setting, policy analysis, policy creation, implementation and monitoring. The kinds of actors participating in the process are displayed around these tasks in the figure. The location of the actors is meant to suggest the tasks in which the actors primarily participate. You will notice that many of these actors are from civil society and the private sector, emphasizing once again that the governance “market” is not restricted to public agencies. All of the tasks in this control loop deal with legislation, cases, regulations or other sources of norms in some way. The agenda setting task calls existing norms into question and puts issues in need of discussion on the political agenda. The task of policy analysis is to try to understand the issues, the interests of the persons and groups affected by the norms and to elicit high-level legislative proposals for resolving the issues and arguments pro and contra the alternative proposals. In the policy creation phase, the responsible legislative body, typically working in committees, makes use of the results of the analysis phase to formulate a policy and draft appropriate legislation, which then by some presumably democratic decision-making process gets enacted, perhaps after some revisions. The implementation task puts the policy into practice by producing regulations interpreting and operationalizing the legislation, reorganizing the responsible agencies as necessary to