The complexity, volume and diversity of government policies and regulations raises significant burden on both the complying parties and government itself. On the one hand, businesses, civil organizations and other societal entities are required to simultaneously comply with and interpret different and possibly conflicting or inconsistent regulations. On the other hand, government as a whole must ensure policy and regulatory coherence across its various policy domains. While the recent wave of open government initiatives have led to significantly more public access to these documents, features allowing cross-referencing related documents and linking to less formal documents or comments on other media more understandable and accessible to the public are not common if at all available today. As a solution to this challenge, we propose an Open Government-wide Policy and Regulation Information Space consisting of documents that are “semantically” annotated and cross-linked to other documents in the information space as well as to external resources such as interpretations, comments and blogs on the social web. Our approach is three-fold. First, we identify the requirements for the infrastructure. Second, we eloborate a Reference Architecture identifying the various elements needed within the infrastructure. Third, we show how such infrastructure may be realised as a linked data portal where policies and regulations are published as linked open data. Finally, we present a case study involving environmental policy and regulations; discuss the potential impact of such infrastructure on coherency and accessibility of policies and regulations and concludes with challenges associated with provisioning a linked open policy and regulatory information infrastructure.

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Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie
Enabling Networked Knowledge
Improving Policy Coherence and Accessibility
through Semantic Web Technologies:
Environmental Policies as Linked Open Data
Adegboyega Ojo, DERI, NUI Galway
Lewis John McGibbney, Stanford University
Edward Curry, DERI, NUI Galway

2. Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie
Government Policies
n Policy is very complex
¨ Multiplicity
¨ Multi-tenancy
n Policy is Dynamic
¨ Especially environmental
and energy
n Policies are related and
co-occur
¨ Government and end-
users are usually
oblivious to policy
relationship and
interactions

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Policy
Coherence
Policy
Accessibility
Policy
Compliance
Motivation

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Motivation - Policy Coherence
n Varying Levels of Consistency
¨ Across geographical boundaries
e.g. counties, districts, national and
international
¨ Internal consistency and cross-
domain coherence of policies within
local government departments
n Goals of Policy Coherency
¨ Consistent interpretation of policy
¨ Comprehensive policies ease
decision making
¨ Decision making on quality rather
than quantity

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Motivation - Policy Accessibility
n What is Policy Accessibility?
¨ The ability for state and local government departments,
business and citizens to have open access to state policy
¨ To have access to policy in formats which they can
consume and absorb in order to facilitate their work
¨ Providing open access to all aspects of society including
citizens with impairments
n How is policy accessibility achieved
¨ Making use of web technologies to provide transparent
access to policy and regulations (i.e. Web Portals)
¨ Simplifying policy drafting and publishing workflows

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Desired Outcome - Policy Compliance
n Policy Coherency Aids Compliance
¨ The more people understand policy, the easier it is to
make steps to compliance
¨ Reduces the costs for SME/SMB’s, normal citizens and
other parties to comply
– Reduces need for lawyer to interpret policy.
n Policy Accessibility Aids Compliance
¨ Provides a platform for more effective engagement with
policies
¨ Encourages more of society to engage with, and
understand, policy and regulations which may affect them.

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Environmental Regulation Web Portal
n A wealth of documents relating to Environmental
Regulation are published in the portal
¨ Users are simply expected to comply
¨ Need to consult and study multiple document to understand
compliance requirements

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Linked Open Data Cloud
Over 300 open data sets with more than 35 billion facts,
interlinked by 500 million typed links.
http://lod-cloud.net/
Linking Open Data cloud diagram, by Richard Cyganiak and Anja Jentzsch.
Media
Government
Geo
Publications
User-generated
Life sciences
Cross-domain
US government
UK government
BBC
New York Times
LinkedGeoData
8
BestBuy
Overstock.com
Facebook

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Linked Data Principles
1. Use URIs to identify the “things” in your data
2. Use HTTP URIs so people (and machines) can
look them up on the Web
3. When a URI is looked up, return a description of the
thing in a structured format (RDF)
4. Include links to related things to provide context
http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html

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Could Lightweight Policy Semantics Help ?
n Could Linked Data increase accessibility of policies?
¨ Use of established vocabularies and descriptions
to describe policies
n Could Linked Data aid in the coherence of policies?
¨ Stakeholders adopt shared vocabulary when
interpreting and exchanging communication
over policy

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The Linked Policy Concept
n Building Regulations
¨ Address co-occurrence and inherent complexities
– Use of industry standards e.g. ISO, IFC, to explicitly represent
relevant citations essential to a more comprehensive
understanding of technical documents
¨ Improve cohesion and interpretation of complex technical
regulations and policy
– Use of industry vocabularies for describing physical
construction and building entities within specific contexts
n Fisheries Policy
¨ Utilising linked data to invoke inferences between the
environment, EU quotas and local policy
n Publication Workflows
¨ Engaging with regulation drafters to ensure that Linked
Data is baked in to their workflows

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Linked Environmental Regulation Portal
¨ Compliment, not replace, existing practice and workflows
with Linked Data Infrastructure

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Building
Regula,on
LD
Wrapper
Policy
HTTP/RDF
Federated
Linked
Policy
Dataspace
Services
Social
Collabora,on
Environme
ntal
Regula,on
LD
Wrapper
HTTP/RDF
Energy
Policy
LD
Wrapper
HTTP/RDF
Search
and
Discovery
RDF
API,
SPARQL
High-Level Reference Architecture
Policy
Analysis
Interlinking layer for
connecting related
policies
Conversion of policies
to RDF/Linked Data
Compliment existing
workflows
Policy services and
collaboration

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Research Challenges
n What type of lightweight policy semantic
framework can be used to improve coherence and
accessibility to policy end users including the policy
makers, policy engineers, etc.?
n What kind of processes is required to create a
sustainable semantic policy modelling practice
in governmental and international organizations?
n What kind of technology infrastructure is required
to enable the modelling, linking, publishing and
management of these semantic policies?
n What policy analyses services are possible?