DocEng 2011: Expressing Conditions in Tailored Brochures for Public Administration

The 11th ACM Symposium on Document Engineering Mountain View, California, USA September 19-22, 2011 Expressing Conditions in Tailored Brochures for Public Administration Nathalie Colineau, Cecile Paris, Keith Vander Linden Presented by Keith Vander Linden. ABSTRACT Citizen-focused documents in Public Administration devote considerable effort to the expression of conditions. These conditions are commonly expressed as statements of eligibility requirements for the programs being described, but they manifest themselves in other places as well, such as in feedback to readers in tailored informational brochures and as input fields on program application forms. This paper discusses how administrative conditions can be represented in a manner that supports both the eligibility reasoning required for the generation of citizen-tailored documents and also the automated generation of condition expressions in a variety of forms. The presentation pays particular attention to the question of how a generation mechanism can allow authors to override the default forms of automated expression when necessary. The discussion is based on a prototype tailored delivery application whose knowledge base is implemented in OWL DL and whose output is constructed using Myriad, a platform for tailored document planning and formatting. This work is the result of a collaboration between CSIRO, Centrelink, the Australian service delivery organization for health and human services, and Calvin College.