Regulatory Information Management and Compliance Assistance

1 Abstract The REGNET Project aims to develop a formal information infrastructure for regulatory information management and compliance assistance. This paper discusses three components of current research and development efforts. The first is a document repository containing federal and state regulations and supplemental documents. This repository includes a suite of concept hierarchies that enable users to browse documents according to the terms they contain. The second is an XML framework for representing regulations and associated metadata. The XML framework enables the augmentation of regulation text with tools and information that will help users understand and comply with the regulation. The third component is the creation of a compliance assistance system built upon the XML framework. The compliance assistance system and the document repository can serve as a backend for the development of application-specific compliance guidance systems. The prototype effort for the document repository has been focused on environmental regulations and related documents. The compliance assistance system is illustrated in the domain of used oil management.