Digital Government: REGBASE: A Distributed Information Infrastructure for Regulation Management and Compliance Checking

Stanford University, Stanford CA

Investigators

Abstract

EIA-9983368 Law, Kincho H. Stanford University Digital Government: REGBASE: A Distributed Information Infrastructure for Regulation Management and Compliance Checking This research project proposes to develop a formal, but practical infrastructure (REGBASE) to support national efforts to make governmental regulations publicly and beneficially available. The objective is to enhance the access and retrieval of government regulations by the public, as well as to provide support for the users, framers and critics of the regulations. It has been well recognized that the complexity, diversity, and volume of regulations are detrimental to business and also hinder public understanding of government. The means to improve the situation is to understand the issues in depth, and then develop tools that can support the interaction and collaboration among different parties involved. In the proposed distributed information service framework, governmental regulatory information will be made available on-line for use by designers, inspectors and regulatory policy bodies. The infrastructure includes repositories as a base and, more importantly, tools to locate, merge, compare, and analyze the information. This application infrastructure will exploit in an intelligent way the communication and computational resources that are now widely available to the public. New network access, search and analysis tools will help disseminate regulatory data and allow finding and comparing multiple sources of related data. Partial support for this project is provided by the Information Technology and Infrastructure Systems program of NSF's Directorate for Engineering.