Elsevier

Decision Support Systems

Volume 34, Issue 3, February 2003, Pages 339-357
Decision Support Systems

Using knowledge management to reform the Russian Criminal Procedural Codex

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0167-9236(02)00125-2Get rights and content

Abstract

The SenseViewer Knowledge Management System (KMS) helps users retrieve and understand information fragments and their attributes by linking them to underlying arguments within their topic realm and exposing their context within source documents. This paper examines SenseViewer, its relationship to rapid knowledge construction, and its use to support the drafting and passage of a new Criminal Procedural Codex by the Russian DUMA. It considers what set of KM functions and tools facilitate the legislative process and dissemination of knowledge to the populace. SenseViewer illustrates a new generation of web-based e-government KMS.

Introduction

Drafting and passage of legislation—making the rules of the game in society—stand as central concerns of democratic governments. This process is knowledge-intensive, involving written artifacts of previous cycles of the legislative process, popular and academic written sources and hearings, discussions, debates, contributions by knowledgeable experts, etc. Supporting the internal legislative process should involve applying knowledge management concepts and tools, including creating an appropriate repository of materials (for codification and retrieval) and a set of tools for stimulating and supporting knowledge creation and use [33]. Technical support for knowledge management must go beyond “collaborative tools such as Lotus Notes, argumentation systems such as Issue-Based Information Systems (IBIS) and knowledge-based techniques” to encompass “complex support tools…e.g., for ordering and retrieval: indexing, categorising, semantic correspondences, definition of hyper-structures, fuzzy retrieval, case based search, etc.” [27, p. 276].

But a vision of electronic government (EG) involves not only the improvement of processes for legislators and their staffs, but increased communication with and participation by citizens [27]. The WWW now makes it possible to comprehensively address two core EG goals: providing “access to [the] administration's information and knowledge to citizens and authorities,” and more specifically, “[m]aking laws, judicial decrees and administrative processes transparent to employees of authorities and, above all, to the citizens” [55, i]. It “implies a fundamental change in knowledge distribution for an activity,” shifting knowledge that was possessed “nearly exclusively by [the] authority's internal members…to…citizens and business partners” [56, p. 341]. Indeed, “[i]n order for legislation to be effective it needs to be accessible for all constituents and transparent since that will give citizens the possibilities to verify the rationale behind it and behave concordant to it” [52, p. 126].

However, existing governmental websites vary widely in the degree to which they provide access to legislative materials. The Cyberspace Policy Research Group (http://www.cyprg.arizona.edu) has tracked such sites since 1996 and reports that there are now over 2000 sites in over 120 countries [25]. Managers of these websites have concentrated more on making information available than making it convenient to access [18]. About 37% of the countries “provided reports, research, laws, and regulations in easily readable format on screen” on all sites, and 60% of the countries provided this on four-fifths of their sites. However, only 8% of countries included “a searchable index for archived newsletters, laws, regulations, and requirements” on all sites, and about half the countries provided this on less than 30% of their sites [17]. Taylor and Burt [49, p. 62] show that “parliaments, as expressed through their Web sites, are locked into a parliamentary model of democracy that prevents a more informative, expressive, political, knowledge-developing and activist approach to relationships with citizens.”

Furthermore, the problems encountered with full text indexing and searches are well known and remain fairly intractable. Attempts to find all relevant sources about an issue (high recall), which may be legally necessary when drafting legislation, result in the retrieval of large numbers of irrelevant texts as well (low precision) [21], [44]. Furthermore, “explicit knowledge relevant for a specific [legislative] workflow task or decision is normally spread over many different kinds of documents, forms, legislative texts, etc.…[L]inks and relationships between documents are often not explicitly represented in software systems for information retrieval and access” [1, p. 48]. Higher level knowledge structures are needed to provide semantically based retrieval.

During the Fall 2000 and Spring 2001 legislative sessions in Russia, the SenseViewer knowledge management system was used to support writing and passage of a specific bill by the Legislative Committee of the Russian DUMA. This bill (see Section 2.2) is part of a set of judicial reforms that will overhaul the Russian judicial system from top to bottom, including new rules about judges, prosecutors, trials, lawyers, juries, defendants, evidence, and so forth [37]. These reforms are seen as essential for reducing widespread corruption and providing the basis for dependable business relationships and the civil society as a whole [57].

This paper examines the ways in which the SenseViewer system fulfills the needs for the necessary complex legislation support tool. Section 2 examines antecedents of the system, and Section 3 looks at its design and connections to relevant knowledge management approaches. Section 4 presents some results of using the system. Section 5 discusses these findings and considers what role knowledge management may play in supporting the legislative process, both for legislators and the public as a whole. A short conclusion follows in Section 6.

Section snippets

Development of SenseViewer at Russian Word/Cogitum

Work on what would eventually become SenseViewer was started in 1998 at the Russian Word software firm in Moscow (http://www.rword.ru) and its sister firm Cogitum in Reston, VA (http://www.cogitum.com). The initial idea was to store texts in a database, and assign attributes to them in such a way that it would become possible to see underlying patterns, sifting out redundant, stale, inaccurate, or biased information. This seemed to be a particularly pressing problem in Russia, where so much of

Architecture

The starting point for a SenseViewer knowledge base is a structurization of the issue under consideration. Fig. 1 shows the organization of frames and slots. The topic/problem under consideration occupies a single metaframe, and the slots in that frame represent the issues or questions of interest about that topic/problem. These link to their own frames. Each frame has an unlimited number of slots, each slot representing an issue, position, question, etc. about the topic of the frame. These

Building and using the DUMA UPK System

Evaluating the potential for the subsequent use of SenseViewer in a wide variety of applications rests not only on seeing it from the perspective of related systems that have been developed over the past two decades, but also on understanding the process and results from its use in a major application.

Discussion

The DUMA UPK System does not yet meet the vision for “complex [e-government] support tools” [27], but does include the central elements needed to support multiple points of view, which is at the heart of knowledge management for the inquiring organization of the future [16]. SenseViewer supports multiple markups for the same external documents, which is a key advantage in a legislative environment where numerous political parties, administrative bodies, legislative committees, and other

Conclusion

If there is any activity that needs an organizational memory, it is the legislative process. Legislation often addresses wicked problems. It is highly structured, providing the starting point for a semantic structurization that goes beyond traditional information retrieval techniques. Legislation is drafted and revised across many years, tested and interpreted numerous times in courts by police forces, prosecutors, and by numerous other stakeholders. It must be understood by changing sets of

Acknowledgements

This research would not have been possible without the support, help, and encouragement of Leonid Malkov, Alla Polegenkaya, Alexander Massytchev, and others at Russian Word/Cogitum and the DUMA Legislation Committee. Thanks also to Maria Wimmer and William Burnheim. Financial support was provided by a summer research grant from the College of Business Administration, University of Akron.

William McHenry joined the Department of Management in the College of Business Administration of the University of Akron as an associate professor in Fall 2000. Prior to this, he taught for 15 years at the McDonough School of Business, Georgetown University. He received his PhD in MIS from the University of Arizona in 1985. His articles have appeared in The Communications of the ACM, The Journal of MIS, Information Processing and Management, The Journal of the Association of Information Systems

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