Cracking the code

Abstract

This innovation primer was prepared by the Observatory of Public Sector Innovation (OPSI), in the Open and Innovative Government Division of the Public Governance Directorate (GOV) of the OECD. OPSI collects and analyses examples and shared experiences of public sector innovation to provide practical advice to countries on how to make innovation work. This primer has been drafted by James Mohun and Alex Roberts of OPSI, under the coordination of Marco Daglio, Head of OPSI.

Towards Protecting Vital Healthcare Programs by Extracting Actionable Knowledge from Policy

“…A recent global movement known as 'Rules as Code' (Mohun et al, 2020) identifies several methods to tackle this. The one our system uses involves extracting rules from policy text via NLP, to minimize translation steps.…”

“…Organizations need novel approaches to help with regulatory compliance, and Rules as Code (RaC) is an initiative that envisages "an official version of rules (e.g., laws and regulations) in a machineconsumable form, which allows rules to be understood and actioned by computer systems in a consistent way" (Mohun et al, 2020). It forms part of a broad movement towards digital government and has garnered broad public-sector interest.…”

“…Approaches to achieving machine-executable RaC rules for published legislation run from manual coding by multi-disciplinary teams to automatic code-generation from natural-language legislation (Mohun et al, 2020). The former approach brings legislative drafters, policy analysts and software developers together to coproduce human and machine-consumable versions of rules.…”