Monitoring and Updating Regulations and Policies for Government Services

Abstract

One of the challenges citizens and businesses face in interacting with governments for entitled services or compliance services is to find the right set of regulations and rules that are applicable for them. Very often the regulations and policies that determine the applicability of specific services are implemented and provided by separate government agencies, thus scattered in different Web sites and documents and are hard to be identified. In addition, the regulatory rules and government policies change often, making it harder to maintain the applicable services. In this paper, we present an integrated policy ontology of distributed regulatory rules and policies to support the discovery of applicable regulations and services. We present an ontology-guided annotation and extraction of policy rules from Web source documents. To support the dynamic changes in regulatory and policy rules, we developed a method of automatic updating the policy ontology by monitoring the source text documents. We describe a prototype eligibility verification system that verifies eligibility for various welfare government services. The eligibility rules and policies are extracted from different government websites to enrich the policy ontology. The eligibility rules and policies are monitored, and automatically updated, should any changes occur.