REGNET: Regulatory information management, compliance and analysis

•We describe a regulation-centric framework for compliance assistance and analysis.•We present a relatedness analysis for comparing regulatory documents.•We describe comparative analysis of regulations based on eco-system model.

This paper provides an overview of a research effort that aims to investigate methodologies and tools to facilitate access, compliance and analysis of government regulations. The complexity, diversity, and volume of government regulations are detrimental to business and hinder public understanding of government. The burden of complying with regulations can fall disproportionately on small businesses since these businesses may not have the expertise or resources to keep track of the regulations and the requirements. Regulations emanating from different agencies, each has its own objectives and scopes of concerns, may overlap on similar and related issues and may have inconsistency. The situation can potentially be improved by developing appropriate methodologies and tools that can help facilitate the development and analysis of regulatory documents as well as compliance process. To illustrate, this paper discusses the applications of information technology for selected services related to regulations, such as compliance assistance and comparison of regulations.