A software infrastructure for regulatory information management and compliance assistance.

摘要

There is a great deal of information available online regarding environmental regulations and the associated supplementary documents. The sheer volume and complexity of this information, coupled with its scattered distribution across many different sources, makes any attempt to understand and interpret the information a daunting task. Furthermore, current environmental regulation compliance checking is largely a paper-based process. Information technology is used simply to make available online versions of the paper-based guides and forms. Our vision for the regulation compliance process is to have organized and up-to-date regulatory information and compliance assistance procedures available over the Internet. Towards that end, we seek to develop information management frameworks that can facilitate public access to regulations and that can also facilitate the compliance process.; This thesis addresses the problem of regulation compliance by developing a formal information infrastructure for regulatory information management and compliance assistance. There are three main contributions made in this thesis. First, a document repository containing regulations and supplemental documents is designed to help categorize these regulatory documents and make them more accessible. This repository, or collection of stored documents, includes a suite of concept hierarchies that enable users to browse documents according to the terms they contain. Second, an XML framework is proposed to structure the representation of regulations and the 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. Third, an Internet-enabled regulation assistance system is built that can guide users through regulation requirements to help them determine if they are in compliance, and also identify relevant supplementary documents.