ACCESSIBILITY

The Accessibility Regulations branch of the Project focuses on regulations whose intent is to provide the same or equivalent access to a building and its facilities for disabled persons.  Regulations include federal as well as European standards and codes of practice.

Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

REGBASE PROJECT SUMMARY

The REGBASE research project proposes to develop a formal, but practical infrastructure to support national efforts to make governmental regulations publicly and beneficially available. The objective is to enhance the access and retrieval of government regulations by the public, as well as to provide support for the users, framers and critics of the regulations.  It has been well recognized that the complexity, diversity, and volume of regulations are detrimental to business and also hinder public understanding of government.  The means to improve the situation is to understand the issues in depth, and then develop tools that can support the interaction and collaboration among different parties involved.

In the proposed distributed information service framework, governmental regulatory information will be made available on-line for use by designers, inspectors and regulatory policy bodies. The infrastructure includes repositories as a base and, more importantly, tools to locate, merge, compare, and analyze the information. This application infrastructure will exploit in an intelligent way the communication and computational resources that are now widely available to the public. New network access, search and analysis tools will help disseminate regulatory data and allow finding and comparing multiple sources of related data.