A Framework for Regulation Comparison

An objective of this research is to develop a framework for regulation management as well as for comparing regulations from multiple sources. An online repository for regulatory documents is created with the help of text mining tool, and users can access provisions either through the natural hierarchy of regulations or from a concept taxonomy generated by knowledge engineers. Relevant provisions are identified and brought to the user’s attention through similarity analysis, which utilizes both the structure and referencing of regulations to provide a better comparison between provisions. Preliminary results show that our prototypic system is able to accurately identify similarities between Federal regulations, as well as the European codes, for disabled access.