Introduction

This paper reports on an experiment testing whether it is possible to create an XML authoring system which pro-actively aids during the drafting lifecycle of amendment documents, from initial draft to voting. The goal of the system is to provide a user interface (UI) that is quite similar to Microsoft Word but it is XML based. Having an XML-first workflow reduces the conversion burden but that is not something the authors of amendment documents are concerned with. Therefore, in order to get users to adopt the new system, it must provide clear benefits to those users.

The benefits realized during the experiment are:

  1. Assisted checking whether an amendment is correct.

  2. Ordering amendments for voting.

  3. Simulation of the effect of an amendment to the actual law.

The scope of the experiment is to test whether it is possible to realize those benefits in a software system. The first part of the system is a UI where users write the content of an amendment document. The UI is implemented using a WYSIWYG XML editor. The second part of the system provides real-time warnings and on-demand simulation in case there are no warnings.