Regulation retrieval using industry specific taxonomies

  • Authors:

  • Chin Pang Cheng;Gloria T. Lau;Kincho H. Law;Jiayi Pan;Albert Jones

  • Affiliations:

  • Engineering Informatics Group, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA;Engineering Informatics Group, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA;Engineering Informatics Group, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA;School of Civil Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China;Enterprise Systems Group, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD

  • Venue:
  • Artificial Intelligence and Law
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Increasingly, taxonomies are being developed and used by industry practitioners to facilitate information interoperability and retrieval. Within a single industrial domain, there exist many taxonomies that are intended for different applications. Industry specific taxonomies often represent the vocabularies that are commonly used by the practitioners. Their jobs are multi-faceted, which include checking for code and regulatory compliance. As such, it will be very desirable if industry practitioners are able to easily locate and browse regulations of interest. In practice, multiple sources of government regulations exist and they are often organized and classified by the needs of the issuing agencies that enforce them rather than the needs of the communities that use them. One way to bridge these two distinct needs is to develop methods and tools that enable practitioners to browse and retrieve government regulations using their own terms and vocabularies, for example, via existing industry taxonomies. The mapping from a single taxonomy to a single regulation is a trivial keyword matching task. We examine a relatedness analysis approach for mapping a single taxonomy to multiple regulations. We then present an approach for mapping multiple taxonomies to a single regulation by measuring the relatedness of concepts. Cosine similarity, Jaccard coefficient and market basket analysis are used to measure the semantic relatedness between concepts from two different taxonomies. Preliminary evaluations of the three relatedness analysis measures are performed using examples from the civil engineering and building industry. These examples illustrate the potential benefits of regulatory usage from the mapping between various taxonomies and regulations.