Data collection from legislation-An ontological approach

Legislation connects government service providers (agencies, and their partners) to government service consumers (individuals and organisations). While legislation is a rich source, it is difficult to navigate, complex to understand and is subject to frequent change. This research-in-progress paper offers a novel way using ontologies to model the relationship terms existing in government service delivery legislation. An ontology provides the agreed definitions and describes how the terms in a subject area, or a domain, are related. If an ontology of government service delivery terms and relationships was available, then, both government service providers and service consumers could use the model to assess the impact of legislative change. The problem is that intense manual processing is required to detect the terms and the relationships existing in legislation, and there is scant coverage of the process in the literature that can be used to develop an ontology of government relationships. This paper describes the data collection method being taken to detect, extract and analyse the terms and relationships existing in legislation using a case study of an Australian government family tax benefit.