GovUI-Onto: An Ontological Method for Investigating Alignment of Government User Interfaces to Legislation

The research being reported exapts a method to build an ontology, and a method for detecting terms from text, and applies these to the problem of identifying potential misalignment of government user interfaces (GovUI) to the legislation it is meant to be implementing. Misalignment may suggest that when government may be collecting too much, or too little information. Too much information suggests privacy issues, while too little requires customers to provide additional information to enable government to determine their eligibility for limited government services. This paper presents the GovUI-Onto, an ontological method that can be used to identify misalignment. The method is applied in the welfare, taxation, and immigration settings, using the definition of ‘Australian resident’. The findings indicate significant misalignment in all settings. The GovUI-Onto method can be used to detect potential misalignment of GovUIs to the legislation, and it can also be used to avoid misalignment.