Making legislation accessible
Background
The UK government is committed to delivering an innovative and world-leading regulatory system and the Better Regulation Executive (BRE) aims to ensure that regulation is smarter, better targeted, and less costly to business. As a result, the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) and BRE sought a partner supplier for the Alpha phase of the Open Regulation Platform (ORP) to build an enriched, machine readable dataset of regulations.
The project set out to address three strategic aims of government:
- that government, businesses, and third parties will be able to develop tools to help navigate and comply with regulatory obligations in smarter and less burdensome ways;
- that central government can use the platform as an internal tool to navigate and monitor a complex and changing regulatory landscape;
- and that the project will promote the use of emerging technologies and of legislation as data, and in doing so create an entirely new market for bespoke regulatory tools.
The solution
With support from our project partners, Analytics Engines developed a cloud hosted Open Regulatory Platform (ORP) that provides a single, machine-readable library of legislation, regulation, and guidance content for use by businesses, publishers, and government agencies.
Based on open standards and leveraging advanced Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing techniques, the solution simplifies interpretation of the UK Statute Book, reduces regulatory burden, and simultaneously enables the creation of value-added products and services by both existing and established regtech businesses and start-ups.
The solution features extensible and configurable content enrichment pipelines. Some examples of enrichments include topic tagging and markup of deontic language signalling the presence of regulatory obligations/derogations. An “Expert in The Loop” model allows for spot-checking and editing of automated content enrichment.
The solution also features a Citation Graph that connects guidance content with the relevant legislation allowing users to directly access and reference appropriate documentation. In addition, the Citation Graph provides BEIS and BRE with a landscape view of the regulatory environment enabling more effective monitoring.
