Regnet: An Infrastructure for Regulatory Information Management and Compliance Assurance

1 Abstract The Regnet Project aims to develop a formal information infrastructure for regulatory information management and compliance assistance. This paper discusses three basic milestones of current research and development efforts. The first is the creation of a document repository containing federal and state regulations and supplemental documents. This repository includes a suite of concept hierarchies that enable users to browse documents according to the terms they contain. The second is an XML framework for representing regulations and associated metadata. The XML framework enables the augmentation of regulation text with tools and information that will help users understand and comply with the regulation. The third milestone is the creation of a compliance assistance system built upon the XML framework. The prototype effort for the document repository has been focused on environmental regulations and related documents. The compliance assistance system is illustrated in the domain of used oil management.