EnAct is a comprehensive intelligent legislation drafting, management solution, web-based electronic repository and delivery system that has been built to enable the Tasmanian Government (Australia) to produce, distribute and enable public access to reliable, up-to-date, searchable consolidated Tasmanian legislation (1). At the core of the EnAct system is an SGML database, which underpins every part of the EnAct system. All of the legislation stored on the Tasmanian Legislation Database is captured in SGML. The system has attracted a great deal of interest both inside Australia and in other countries.<\/p>\n
The Tasmanian Government initiated the Legislation System Project (LSP) in early 1994 to address a number of issues associated with the production and availability of Tasmanian legislation. New technology and processes were developed for the drafting and maintenance of legislation.<\/p>\n
The main component of this was the EnAct system, which was implemented in the Office of Parliamentary Counsel (OPC), responsible for all legislative drafting within Tasmania ( Bills, Statutory Rules, their accompanying documentation, and the final published versions of Acts and Statutory Rules) in December 1997. The Legislation Publication Act 1996 established the legislation in EnAct as the authorised version.<\/p>\n
The functional requirements for the EnAct system were developed within the Department of Premier and Cabinet and the system design and development was outsourced to GE Capital Information Technology Solutions. As the prime contractor, they provided the systems integration and Project management services that enabled the EnAct solution to be brought together. The enabling technology was developed initially in Australia by the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT). Numerous people have contributed to this project, now with SAIC Pty Ltd. Many original team members are still supporting and developing EnAct.<\/p>\n
Key features of the EnAct system include:
\n\u2022 automatic consolidation of amendment legislation on commencement;
\n\u2022 true ‘point-in-time’ searching of consolidated legislation (searches are carried out on the legislation
\ndatabaseforlegislationrelevantataspecifiedtimepoint);
\n\u2022 innovative automated tools for drafting amendment legislation;
\n\u2022 the ability to present and display legislation in a variety of formats from the same data source;
\n\u2022 advanced searching and browsing capabilities with all cross-references and amendment history
\ninformation stored as electronic hyperlinks;
\n\u2022 quality control points built into the legislation production process;
\n\u2022 business process tracking for legislation drafting tasks; and
\n\u2022 multiple format delivery for the publication of legislation allowing paper based products, CD ROM
\nproducts and HTML publishing via the Internet.<\/p>\n
When exploring the EnAct database, the searches are conducted at today’s date or at a date the user specifes. This allows topics of interest to be researched through time to see how the law has changed. Therefore, users or EnAct will be able to determine the accurate state of the law at the time, for example, an offence is committed, even if the relevant legislation has been amended several times since.<\/p>\n
Therefore, an important feature of EnAct is the automatic consolidation (creating a new version of the Stamp Duty Act 2012 when the amendment is made law)<\/p>\n
It is this automatic consolidation feature which will provide perhaps the most significant benefits of this legislative managing solution. EnAct was the first system in the world to provide this kind of functionality.<\/p>\n
A main feature is the ability to search and present the law at a specified point in time. For example a user can enter the site a 1st May 2013, and then the search result and all the links return the law as it was on that date. The “point-in-time” capability allows any user to search and browse the content of EnAct as it was at any time since 1 February 1997.<\/p>\n
At the core of the system is an SGML database. All legislation in the database is broken up into a
\nnumber of fragments (ie. One fragment per Section or Schedule). Each fragment contains the dates for which that piece of legislation is in force. When legislation is amended, the system automatically builds new versions of fragments which are affected by amendments and keeps the old ones for historical reference. Consolidations are generated by joining together the fragments relevant at a particular point in time.<\/p>\n
Another feature of EnAct is the method of creating or drafting amendment legislation, i.e. the automatic generation of amendment wording (e.g. “The Stamp Duty Act 2012 is amended by inserting after Section 25 following…”).In the past, traditional drafting techniques required the drafters to work from manually pasted-up copies of the legislation directly in conjunction with manual indexes.Drafters used to derive the effect of the amendments with the text describing them. This approach led to the possibility of legislation changes being overlooked.
\nIn Tasmania, the new processes or approach enable amendments to be drafted by marking up directly an electronic version of a consolidated Act and provide access to electronic searching facilities to aid in the preparation of consequential amendments. Amendment is, therefore, be generated automatically.<\/p>\n
“EnAct is a complex system for managing the complete document lifecycle of legislation.Built by RMIT University’s Multimedia Database Systems group, it combines recent research with commercial office solutions experience in government and the private sector. ….The major motivation of the project was to develop a system to produce and manage an electronic repository of legislation to track and record legislation as it changes with time, allowing access to the legislation both as it is now and also as it was at any time in the past. Both electronic and paper publication were to be sourced from this central electronic repository.”(2)<\/p>\n
As see above, Tasmania achieved these goals by automating much of the legislative drafting and consolidation process.<\/p>\n
“SGML(3) is an international standard that supports the representation of logical structure. It is widely used in the legal publishing field because of its suitability for legislation and complex legal commentary. Other advantages of SGML include the longevity of the data (4), vendor independent tool sets (5), the ability to validate the structure of each document against drafting standards (6), and the separation of the creation of content from the presentation of that content (7). SGML was the required encoding standard in the original Request for Tender for a legislation management system. By using SGML, Tasmania is able to automate the fragmentation of an Act, or the joining of a table of contents and set of fragments back into a single Act. This allows documents to be stored either whole or as fragments depending on retrieval requirements of the relevant legislative process stage.”(8)<\/p>\n
“The newer Web standard, XML, which is a simplified subset of SGML, provides similar benefits although it was not available at the beginning of this Project.”(9)<\/p>\n
“A member of the public can contact the PAT shop and request a reprint of a particular Act on a specified day. They search the repository to find the relevant table of contents and fragments at that time point, which are joined together into a single SGML document that is translated into Rich
\nText Format using SIM formatters. This RTF representation is then passed to highspeed printers for paper output. Each authorized version is preceded by a certificate of authenticity from the Chief Parliamentary Counsel.<\/p>\n
At the end of the document two tables appear. The first shows the name and the time of commencement of all amending Acts applied to that Act since it was enacted. The second lists each provision that has been amended and how it was amended. The database that is shared by the public Web gateway and the private Printing Authority gateway is not the only repository in the EnAct system. A working database is also kept in the OPC. This database contains everything in the
\npublic repository, but also contains the politically sensitive draft Bills in preparation, and all of the workflow information about the status of Bills and other draft legislation. Data is periodically migrated from the production database to the publication database providing a level of protection from intrusion and preserving the integrity of the data on the public repository.”(10)<\/p>\n
“All cross-references are activated as hypertext links. Because all hypertext links are activated using queries in the database, it is just as easy to do reverse hypertext links?i.e. show a list of all fragments that refer to this fragment or this Act. When history notes are displayed, those that refer to amending Acts on the system are also hypertext links to those Acts. The table of contents can be viewed either as a conventional section number and headnote or with a section number and list of links to successive versions of the corresponding fragments. This provides a quick overview of the history of a provision.”(11)<\/p>\n
EnAct Introduction to EnAct EnAct is a comprehensive intelligent legislation drafting, management solution, web-based electronic repository and delivery system that has been built to enable the Tasmanian Government (Australia) to produce, distribute and enable public access to reliable, up-to-date, searchable consolidated Tasmanian legislation (1). At the core of the EnAct system is an SGML database, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[108,52,5],"tags":[155,109,7,41,51,80,876],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lawin.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7760"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lawin.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lawin.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lawin.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lawin.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7760"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lawin.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7760\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lawin.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7760"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lawin.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7760"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lawin.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7760"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}