Reaching the law not breaching it! E-POWERing information on up-to-date legislation
Law is indisputably an indelible part of our lives. Banks, private insurance companies and governmental bodies often fall victim to the complexity of new laws due to the lack of knowledge of the ever-changing rules and legislative procedures. E-POWER, an IST EU funded project developed a computer-based method for analysing and facilitating the execution of laws and business rules while keeping consortiums in line with the latest legislation. Assume for instance, that the adoption of a new legislation on pension has a direct impact on the pension policies currently exercised by healthcare services. The E-POWER system is responsible for identifying the differences between what the new law requires and what is currently common practice by the service concerned. A set of structuring tools breaks down legal sources and checks for inconsistencies and legal anomalies. It further constructs a navigation mechanism using references usually found in legal documents. In addition, a group of modelling based software tools automatically retrieves concepts from original textual knowledge sources and processes them uniformly using natural language processing and artificial intelligence. The system mainly focuses on areas such as insurance policies, pension requirements and knowledge-based computer systems. Clients involve governments, banks, for fiscal, personnel benefits, schools for financial regulations, and insurance policies. Institutions like Fortis Bank in Belgium and the Pensions Administration section of the Dutch Ministry of Finance in the Netherlands currently employ the system to harmonise their internal regulations with the latest legislation. Interest is also expressed by potential clients such as commercial organisations, provinces, as well as local municipalities in countries like Germany, France, Spain and the UK. The aim of the project is to give an objective interpretation of the law in question and provide enhanced transparency of legislation. The future looks bright as the system could help users in cutting down on the time to market new/changed legislation and maintenance costs, plus making access to public information more feasible.