From E-Parliament Wiki
Legislative and Legal Informatics
Much of the innovative work done in the development of systems and standards for legislative and legal information systems comes from universities as part of the effort to advance the field of legal informatics. These efforts are of special value in that they foster collaboration not only among parliaments, but also between the legislative and academic communities.
Legislative informatics has the goal of supporting the legislative process by providing information to all actors involved in the legislative process; enabling cooperation among such actors, so that each one can contribute to the process; ensuring efficiency, transparency, and control; enabling access to the outcomes of each phase of the legislative process, and contributions to the next phase (managing the workflow); ensuring the quality of the legislative outputs; and, ensuring knowledge of the produced law texts and preliminary documents.
Though legislative informatics is still a young discipline, it has achieved in the last years a number of significant results in different areas, such as in the domains of legislative documentation, management of the legislative process (workflow), communication and information support, and legislative standards.
For legislation to cope with the formidable challenge of providing a suitable regulatory framework for the information society it is necessary that legislative authorities are able to make the best use of the many instruments and models provided by legislative informatics. For this purpose a closer connection would be desirable between academic work on legislative informatics and research and development taking place within parliaments: too often academic research does not pay attention to user needs and development initiatives do not pay attention to research.
Fortunately, there are recent signs that a more intense cooperation between research in legal informatics and development is underway. On the one hand legislative informatics is producing many results which are usable in legislative practice (for instance, with regard to modelling legal texts, dealing with legal dynamics, building legal ontologies), while on the other hand development projects in legislative informatics show awareness of academic achievements.