A Broker for Environmental Regulations
Dana Stasiak, James Garrett, Jr., Steven Fenves - Carnegie Mellon University
There is an ever growing body of national and international environmental regulations of which companies must be aware. To keep track of this changing state of environmental regulations many large companies have personnel whose main task is to outline applicable regulations and produce internal interpreted summaries of these regulations. This reduces the amount of text that a designer has to read but it still unrealistic to expect that a regulation user can easily locate relevant documents. Designers in smaller companies generally have fewer resources available and must personally maintain an awareness of applicable regulations.
Technical Committee 207 of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) is drafting international environmental management standards to be called ISO 14000. In January of 1995, TC 207 voted that ISO 14000 compliant organizations will: (1) have a commitment to prevent pollution; (2) have a commitment to comply with all applicable environmental regulations; and (3) establish an environmental management auditing system. In the end, it is expected that ISO 14000 will be similar to the BS7750 Standard, already in place in Great Britain, which requires that companies compile a register of all environmental regulations. Thus, there is a potentially critical need for a mechanism to assist companies in finding applicable environmental regulations.
To assist companies, both large and small, in tracking, accessing and using environmental regulations, we propose the concept of an environmental regulations broker. The basic concept of the broker is to provide access to electronic forms of environmental regulations over a distributed wide-area network. The broker serves as the link between regulatory agencies and regulation users. Fig. 1 shows a schematic of the broker concept. Regulatory agencies provide electronic forms of their regulations in a format compatible with the broker and register the location of these regulations with the broker. Thus, agencies maintain ownership of the document and can update their regulations as needed, but the regulations are centrally indexed, advertised, searched for and accessed.
Figure 1 - Broker Concept Schematic
The current broker prototype resides on the World Wide Web, a hypermedia graphical interface to the Internet, and incorporates Inquery, a full-text search engine developed at the University of Massachusetts. Because the broker is intended to serve as a link between regulatory agencies and regulation users, the broker's main database contains the titles, Internet addresses and keywords of each registered regulation. Through a set of HTML forms and associated scripts , the broker allows users to search environmental regulations in two stages. In the first stage, the user searches the broker's main database to retrieve a list of possibly relevant regulations. Then, once a user selects a regulation, the broker retrieves a copy from the regulatory agency for further detailed searching.
Full-text searching is useful only if the words provided by the user actually appear in the text of the document. To aid in finding implied concepts, the broker incorporates a classification system by which regulation documents and their parts are tagged with classifiers used to support searches. The classification scheme allows a regulation author to define several top level facets of classification, each one consisting of a tree of mutually exclusive classifiers. While searching a regulation, the user can interactively select classifiers out of these classification trees and Inquery searches for the parts of the regulation possessing those classifiers
Our plans are to expand the existing prototype broker to support a field trial. To reach this level, work is needed in four areas.
- The authoring process for converting the plain text of regulations into a searchable database of small sub-documents needs to be automated.
- The assignment of classifiers needs to be computer-augmented. This includes two parts: the use of thesaurus to match alternate terms and possibly provide language translation and provide a method for creating higher level, conceptual classifiers.
- The top level classifiers that apply to whole regulations need to be automatically generated based on the document specific classifications.
- Finally, support for annotation at three levels must be provided: comments and explanatory material from the regulatory agency; internal corporate summaries of regulations; and personal annotations by individual users.
For More Information
James H. Garrett, Jr.(412) 268-5674
Email: garrett+@andrew.cmu.edu