Herford-Project

CHALLENGES

The Herford-Projekt is a feasability study, which was conducted in the German County of Herford in order to assess the potential of a legal knowledge system in the domain of family law. The goals of this project were to describe the actual work processes, to propose optimized processes if needed and to develop a prototype. The study was based on interviews, on two test cases submitted to clerks and on an online questionnaire.

Result:

The study showes that there were potential problems in the domain of parent support in the County of Herford, both in terms of productivity and quality of processes. It was demonstrated that it was possible to optimize work processes using a knowledge management solution consisting of a legal rule-based system and a knowledge-sharing component.  Moreover our legal rule-based prototype demonstrated the feasibility of modeling and implementing relevant laws and regulations with an acceptable amount of effort.

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GOALS

The goals of this feasibility study are:

• To describe the actual work processes

• To evaluate the consistency and the quality of the actual work processes

• To propose optimized work processes

• To develop a prototype for a legal knowledge system.
  

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TECHNOLOGY

The prototype developed in the study is based on two different tools:

•  a legal rule-based system to support the resolution of the cases

•  a knowledge-sharing system.

The Legal rule-based system requires and uses one or more computer models of the relevant legislation. In this case the prototype was written with software called StatuteExpert, a rules engine platform developed by an Australian firm called SoftLaw. Specialized for government, this platform can integrate large bodies of complex legislation, regulations, policy and administrative procedures. Its end-user interface is a simple web browser. The prototype currently includes about 200 rules created from the legal model defined by the project’s team. It enables users to decide whether someone is obliged to pay parent support and to decide who has to pay what (for example in the case where several brothers and sisters have to pay different amounts of money depending on their financial situation).

The prototype for sharing knowledge is based on RSS. RSS is a family of XML file formats for web syndication. This acronym has several interpretations: Rich Site Summary, RDF Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication. The latter is currently the most commonly used, as RSS provides “items” containing short descriptions of web content together with a link to the full version of the content. This information is provided as an XML file called an RSS feed. In order to access these feeds, users rely on applications called feed readers that check RSS-enabled Web pages and retrieve any updated content that it finds. The prototype used existing services to publish knowledge: A “moderator” with basic knowledge of content management systems can validate this new content before it is available to anyone.In the Herford example, clerks could notify their colleagues when they have found a new piece of knowledge in legal databases, online law commentaries, or when they have themselves implemented a new form or a new calculation formula. A moderator could then validate or complete this knowledge published by a clerk. All clerks could then rely on this knowledge in their daily work, as it would have been validated by a “domain expert”. Furthermore, specific thematic RSS feeds can be defined: users can then choose precisely what knowledge they want to receive. The prototype is functional and can be accessed at  http://mimik-demo.blogspot.com/.

It offers flexibility for both publishers and readers, it supports basic moderation, it provides automatic notification when new content is published and moderators have the possibility to create thematically aggregated content.

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PARTNERS

Fachhochschule für öffentliche Verwaltung Nordrhein-Westfalen (FhöV)

District of  Herford

Softlaw