Workshop on Modelling Policy-making (MPM 2011)

In conjunction with the 24th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems (JURIX 2011)

December 12 or 13 (TBA), 2011
Vienna, Austria

Context:

As the European Union develops, issues about governance, legitimacy, and transparency become more pressing. National governments and the EU Commission realise the need to promote widespread, deliberative democracy in the policy-making cycle, which has several phases: 1) agenda setting, 2) policy analysis, 3) lawmaking, 4) administration and implementation, and 5) monitoring. As governments must become more efficient and effective with the resources available, modern information and communications technology (ICT) are being drawn on to address problems of information processing in the phases. One of the key problems is policy content analysis and modelling, particularly the gap between on the one hand policy proposals and formulations that are expressed in quantitative and narrative forms and on the other hand formal models that can be used to systematically represent and reason with the information contained in the proposals and formulations.

Submission Focus:

The workshop invites submissions of original research about the application of ICT to the early phases of the policy cycle, namely those before the legislators fix the legislation: agenda setting, policy analysis, and lawmaking. The research should seek to address the gap noted above. The workshop focuses particularly on using and integrating a range of subcomponents – information extraction, text processing, representation, modelling, simulation, reasoning, and argument – to provide policy making tools to the public and public administrators.

Intended Audience:

Legal professionals, government administrators, political scientists, and computer scientists.

Areas of Interest:

information extraction from natural language text
policy ontologies
formal logical representations of policies
transformations from policy language to executable policy rules
argumentation about policy proposals
web-based tools that support participatory policy-making
tools for increasing public understanding of arguments behind policy decisions
visualising policies and arguments about policies
computational models of policies and arguments about policies
integration tools
multi-agent policy simulations
Workshop Schedule:

To be announced.

Workshop Location:

Vienna, Austria. Specific location to be announced.

Webpage URL:

http://wyner.info/LanguageLogicLawSoftware/?p=1157

Important Dates:

Submission: Monday, October 24
Review Notification: Monday, November 7
Final Version: Monday, November 28
Workshop date: in the week of December 12
Author Guidelines:

Submit position papers of between 2-5 pages in length in PDF format and using the IOS Press style files and authors’ guidelines at:
IOS Press Author Instructions

Submit papers to:

MPM 2011 on EasyChair

Publication:

A call for selected extended versions of the papers will be issued for a special issue of AI and Law on Modelling Policy-making.

Program:

To be announced.

Contact Information:

Adam Wyner, adam@wyner.info
Neil Benn, n.j.l.benn@leeds.ac.uk

Program Committee Co-Chairs:

Adam Wyner (University of Liverpool, UK)
Neil Benn (University of Leeds, UK)

Program Committee (Preliminary):

Katie Atkinson
Trevor Bench-Capon
Bruce Edmonds
Tom van Engers
Euripidis Loukis
Tom Gordon
Ann Macintosh
Gunther Schefbeck
Maria Wimmer