Knowledge acquisition from sources of law in public administration

Knowledge acquisition from text, and sources of law in particular, is a well established technique. Text is even - certainly in the context of the Semantic Web - increasingly conceived of as a raw knowledge resource that can be mined for knowledge routinely and automatically.
As experience by large public administrations shows, the maintenance of traceability to the original sources of law from context-dependent knowledge representation resources of various kinds is hardly a solved problem, though. The use of IT in general has increased the organization’s capacity for change in many dimensions, but because of the increasing use of IT the organization has to manage an increasing number of executable pseudo-specifications that contain knowledge of the law but fail to present a coherent picture of it.
In this paper we present some of the guiding principles and ontological distinctions we use in the Agile project to accurately document the use of the law as a knowledge resource in administrative organizations.