Unmasking the Regulatory Burden for Individual Australian Residents

The legislation defines the roles that individuals play, but it causes confusion when a role has different definitions in the same jurisdiction. In Australia, the welfare. taxation and immigration legislation each provide a different definition of an Australian resident. This paper applies the GovUI-Onto, a new method developed to conceptualise and model the implementation of legislation using government user interfaces, to model and compare the regulatory burden imposed on individuals being assessed as Australian residents in different settings. Not surprisingly, the research indicates that there may be a higher regulatory burden for individuals seeking benefits and services from the government, than those who will be required to pay money to the government. The research also identifies how a whole-of-government view of a role, such as an Australian resident, can be developed and used in harmonization exercises to reduce regulatory inconsistencies

GovUI-Onto : An Ontological Method for Investigating Alignment of Government User Interfaces to Legislation

The research being reported exapts a method to build an ontology, and a method for detecting terms from text, and applies these to the problem of identifying potential misalignment of government user interfaces (GovUI) to the legislation it is meant to be implementing. Misalignment may suggest that when government may be collecting too much, or too little information. Too much information suggests privacy issues, while too little requires customers to provide additional information to enable government to determine their eligibility for limited government services. This paper presents the GovUI-Onto, an ontological method that can be used to identify misalignment. The method is applied in the welfare, taxation, and immigration settings, using the definition of ‘Australian resident’. The findings indicate significant misalignment in all settings. The GovUI-Onto method can be used to detect potential misalignment of GovUIs to the legislation, and it can also be used to avoid misalignment

Data Collection from Legislation – An Ontological Approach

Legislation connects government service providers (agencies, and their partners) to government service consumers (individuals and organisations). While legislation is a rich source, it is difficult to navigate, complex to understand and is subject to frequent change. This research-in-progress paper offers a novel way using ontologies to model the relationship terms existing in government service delivery legislation. An ontology provides the agreed definitions and describes how the terms in a subject area, or a domain, are related. If an ontology of government service delivery terms and relationships was available, then, both government service providers and service consumers could use the model to assess the impact of legislative change. The problem is that intense manual processing is required to detect the terms and the relationships existing in legislation, and there is scant coverage of the process in the literature that can be used to develop an ontology of government relationships. This paper describes the data collection method being taken to detect, extract and analyse the terms and relationships existing in legislation using a case study of an Australian government family tax benefit