Transparancy in Government with OpenRegels (Open Rules)

Currently, governmental laws and regulations are captured in legal documents. For the Netherlands, these can be found on, e.g., https://wetten.overheid.nl/. While this is the original source, and it is publicly available and searchable, for many people it is (very) hard to read and interpret these regulations. Laws contain two different kinds of rules; some that need to be open for discussion and judicature, and others are basic rules for calculation such as for establishing the right of financial aid for people with little or no income.

It is especially those rules that, for both government itself, but also for its citizens as well as for software developers, should be as clear as possible. Currently, many interpretations can be found for one rule and different software systems can come to different results with the same input. It is desired that governmental rules are applied unambiguously, regardless of the person of software system evaluating the rule.

OpenRegels (in Dutch) is an initiative that tries to make explicit the ‘correct interpretation’ of law in terms of (business) rules. This enhances transparency and makes it possible to come to the same results, regardless of the person of software evaluating a rule. It also enables the government to backup the decisions taken and provide insights in how the result was determined.

At Trives we support initiatives that enable transparency, especially in government. Together with USoft we set up a method and environment for the structured analysis and interpretation of law and regulation into executable business rules. A first working application was made for the Draagkrachtberekening.