What is Legally Defined Procedure

The presence of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) is becoming more pronounced in Public Administrations and in the context of legal knowledge management. In most countries, it is now possible for citizens to freely access the text of Parliamentary Acts, bills, judgments, et cetera. Analysts that work on re-engineering public administration processes must take into account all relevant sources of law as they will ultimately be modified in order to legitimize the new processes. This chapter considers the requirements to design a framework for business process re-engineering for public administrations by analyzing the existing systems for legal knowledge representation and interchange and the current technologies to assist modeling and change management of business processes. The ultimate goal is that of supporting the law-making process, facilitating the participation of people without a jurisprudence background to the editing of regulations, by providing effective means to comprehend and observe the law, make changes to the law, and to keep track of the dependencies between the text and the models. The framework presented in this chapter integrates several different and rather mature technologies developed in Europe and in Africa, providing a set of tools applicable to virtually any legal system.