RE: Legislation on the web...

Although we have not planned to do so in the first release of the Strategy
Markup Language (StratML) standard, at some point we will want to include
elements enabling referencing of the legal authorities (citations and links)
under which each goal and objective is being pursued.
http://xml.gov/stratml/draft/StratMLCoreGlossary.xml &
http://xml.gov/stratml/draft/StrategicPlanCore.xsd 

It would be nice if there were an international standardized way of doing
so.

BTW, to the degree that laws may be vague, aside from costly and
unpredictable interpretation by the courts, what better way to understand
them than based upon what .gov agencies actually plan to *do* about them
(i.e., their goals and objectives) -- in terms that are measurable and
meaningful to citizens and taxpayers?

Owen Ambur
Co-Chair Emeritus, xmlCoP  
Co-Chair, AIIM StratML Committee
Member, AIIM iECM Committee 
Participant, W3C eGov IG
Membership Director, FIRM Board  
Former Project Manager, ET.gov 

-----Original Message-----
From: public-egov-ig-request@w3.org [mailto:public-egov-ig-request@w3.org]
On Behalf Of Peter Krantz
Sent: Monday, September 08, 2008 4:13 AM
To: Kjetil Kjernsmo; public-egov-ig@w3.org
Subject: Re: Legislation on the web...


On Mon, Sep 8, 2008 at 9:48 AM, Kjetil Kjernsmo
<Kjetil.Kjernsmo@computas.com> wrote:
>
>
> However, the problem is that laws are simply not very logical. There are
many
> cases where you cannot say if (you do this) then (this happens). Laws are
> sometimes deliberately vague, to allow for human consideration, which, I
> suppose is a good thing.

Absolutely. We have been trying to create a technical framework that
in the first step only connects laws with each other (there are a lot
of references between them) in a sound way. We did, however,
anticipate that specific government authorities would like to extend
our general vocabulary with things their specific domain in order to
express more detailed statements. We have found a lot of stuff from
the semweb area works really well here.

Our main problem right now lies with the tools that are used to
produce laws. We are also struggling with regulations that tell us
that laws needs to be published exactly the same way as they looked
when they were signed. Hence, current practice involves a lot of
non-standard PDF documents.

Kind regards,

Peter Krantz

Received on Monday, 8 September 2008 15:52:48 UTC