Timothy Arnold-Moore

Automatic generation of amendment legislation

The Themis system is an integrated drafting environment for legislation which automatically generates the wording of amending legislation in the textual amendment style. Themis provides the legislative drafter with a version of the Act or Regulation to be amended on which the drafter marks the amendments directly. From these marked changes, the system generates an amending Act or Statutory Rule which reflects those changes. The various phases in this system are discussed including the knowledge representation scheme used to represent amendments, the capturing of this knowledge, the process of producing wordings Prom the representation and the control of variant wordings.

Automatically processing amendments to legislation

This paper proposes an architecture for a system which accepts Amending Acts expressed in SGML and produces a database of resulting versions of the Principal Acts, and describes its implementation. It discusses the core natural language processing module which uses an ATN to parse the components of the Acts into a frame representation of amendment actions. This representation is then used to produce database transactions which add the subsequent versions to the database.

Managing a digital library of legislation

We provide an overview of the Themis system, a commercial implementation of a digital library of legislation. !l’hemis uses SGML to store legislation. This allows a single source document to be exported in a number of different formats and presentations. Themis also allows access to different versions of legislation by specifying a point-in-time at which the law is required. We discuss how this is achieved in Themis and how versioning impacts the storage of fragments of documents and management of references within and between documents.

System architectures for structured document data

Semi-structured data, including but not limited to structured documents, has speci c characteristics and is used in ways di erent to tabular data. SGML and XML are widely used to represent information of this type. The demands on systems that manage semi-structured data vary from those on traditional relational systems. This paper reviews the nature and characteristics of semi-structured data, and the functional needs of those applications, including query requirements, document description, manipulation, and document management needs. It examines alternative physical models for semi-structured data, and evaluates and compares alternative system architectures.

Case Study: Managing Legislation

We now consider this model of the document lifecycle in relation to a real production system. EnAct is a complex system for managing the complete document lifecycle of legislation.1 Built by RMIT University’s Multimedia Database Systems group, it combines recent research with commercial office solutions experience in government and the private sector. EnAct was commissioned by the government of Tasmania, a state of Australia, primarily for use by the Office of Parliamentary Counsel (OPC), an office of professional legislative drafters who provide drafting services to the legislature. The OPC is a true document factory, with a virtual monopoly on all legislative drafting within Tasmania. They exist exclusively to produce documents and to draft Bills, Statutory Rules, their accompanying documentation, and, increasingly, the final published versions of Acts and Statutory Rules. The major motivation of the project was to develop a system to produce and manage an electronic repository of legislation to track and record legislation as it changes with time, allowing access to the legislation both as it is now and also as it was at any time in the past. Both electronic and paper publication were to be sourced from this central electronic repository.

Electronic Document Description

We have characterized documents as records of messages that have content, structure and metadata. There may be several ways of describing messages using these three constituents. The choice of which to use depends on how the messages themselves are used and accessed. For example, authorship of a document may be part of the content of a document, an attribute of a document, or both. Similarly, it may not be easy to extract the structure of a document, and it may be helpful to do so only if certain parts of a document are needed or if documents with particular structural properties are required.