Support and focus of Secondary/Delegated/Supplementary Legislation

["McGibbney, Lewis John" <Lewis.McGibbney@gcu.ac.uk>]

Hi Everyone,

So having met Ashok at the Open Legislative Data event in Paris over the weekend we ended up discussing the support for secondary (or as it is also referred to as Supplementary?) legislation.
A small introduction...
I am interested in this exact type of legislation within the domain of design and construction. As Fabio has previously described the task of authoring/amending/publishing/disseminating this legislation can be (and usually is) delegated to some party outside of the parliament. In the case of Scotland the rights/power to produce national building regulations is granted to the Scottish Parliament through the following piece of UK primary legislation [0], which in turn resulted in the Scottish Parliament delegating this task to the Directorate for the Built Environment, resulting in the production of the Scottish Technical Standards[1] (national building regs) and a whole host of supplementary (non-legally binding) guidance and regulation surrounding the building regulations and the regulatory ecosystem itself.

My question relates specifically to bring to the surface the peculiarities we typically experience within delegated legislation of this type e.g. technical images embedded throughout the content, the concept of pages within the legislation, headers, footers, complex tables containing a combination of numeric and String based data, equations relating to energy performance calculations etc. This is by no means an exhaustive list of the nasties we find peppered throughout documents of this type. Such a document can be seen [2]. This particular document has quite a nice selection of nasties displaying the typical hurdles people experience when attempting to comply with such domain specific legal texts... which have been changing more recently on a bi-annual basis.

So now I have two points I wish to throw out to the community

1) I'm sure that similar secondary legislation/regulations within the domains of transport, health care, environment, fisheries, etc etc is of a similar ilke... is anyone else modeling this stuff in Akoma Ntoso? Or does anyone else have experience of working with this type of legislation?
2) If so how accommodating/able have users found the Akoma Ntoso Schema and data model to be in order to accurately represent domain specific legislation of this type? I am very interested in the granularity of the embedded data, the URI naming, parameter accommodation etc etc.

Ashok explained a good bit to me about the Akoma Ntoso data model and I've also seen the subschema generator and will be using it more and more to test out my usage scenario's but I would really like to hear back from more experienced users within this area to hear and learn from your resources.

Thank you kindly in advance and also for ay feedback you may be able to share with me/us.

All the best

Lewis

[0] http://www.legislation.gov.uk/asp/2003/8/contents
[1] http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Topics/Built-Environment/Building/Building-standards/publications/pubtech
[2] http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Resource/Doc/217736/0121478.pdf

Lewis John McGibbney BSc (Hons), ICIOB
PhD Researcher Informatics in Design and Construction
School of Engineering and Built Environment
Glasgow Caledonian University
0141 331 8420
lewis.mcgibbney@gcu.ac.uk

Glasgow Caledonian University is a registered Scottish charity, number SC021474

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