e-Government: A legislative ontology for the 'SIAP' parliamentary management system

Abstract

The requirement of integrating, sharing and reusing legislative information is a research issue gaining priority for governments and institutions. The legal world is complex, heterogeneous and wide in scope. Therefore, we find convenient to define ontologies as a tool to decrease this complexity inherent to the legal domain. This paper is based on the Parliamentary Integrated Management System (SIAP) built for the Asamblea of Madrid and that is successfully running since 1999. In this context, we describe how SIAP manages the Legislative Initiative (LI) that arrives to a Parliament. Later, we propose an ontology in order to describe the LI, called Legislative Ontology (LO). This LO conceptually models the LI including the structure of the Emendations to this LI and is connected with the act of making and passing laws. So, this LO makes easier the organizing task in the LI and, in general, all the Legislative procedural steps. Besides, this ontology could be offered as a basis for other parliamentary systems (as SIAP) to improve their LI procedures. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2005.