One of the projects we’re working on at the moment is for The National Archives (TNA) and relates to updating the system for consolidation of legislation – the Expert Participation Model (known as Participation). It’s a big, complex project using many cutting edge technologies and techniques. We thought we would start to share some of the workings.
One aspect of the editorial process has always been very manual. That is, identifying the changes to existing legislation that occur as part of new legislation. It is very common for new UK legislation to change existing legislation, often in very complex and subtle ways. Processing these changes is a very time consuming process. In order to improve the (presently manual) processing one of the two main strands of activity within Participation is to automate the extraction of the changes that new legislation makes to existing legislation. New legislation is published every working day so our objective is to process the new documents as they are loaded.
Amendments to legislation break down into various types. The project has so far tackled several areas, with the most complete and complex area being so-called ‘textual amendments’. These are amendments that actually modify the text of other legislation. For instance, it might be something like ‘In section 3 for “vehicle” substitute “automobile”’.
