LIMS Project

Comment
The LIMS Project is divided into the following sub-projects:

• Canada statutes and regulation conversion
• Development of the statutes and regulations consolidation system
• Development of the drafting environment
• Development of the public Web site

Project Overview

LIMS (Legal Information Management System) Project Document Management System

• Client: Department of Justice Canada
• Mandate: Developed a document management system to assist the entire legislative process (drafting, consolidation, electronic publishing)
• Solution: Document management system, including XML editor, amendment tracking system, XML database and Web-page generation module
• Services Provided: Project analysis, data conversion, development
• Technology Used: XML and related technology, TeraText XML database, MS-SQL relational database management system

Read also: Justice Department upgrade to ease legislative changes, ITBusiness.ca, October 2006.

Client's Problem

The Department of Justice of Canada is responsible for developing the legal content of bills, regulations and guidelines. It also acts as the Government's law firm.

The Department wanted to make Canadian legislation more easily and quickly accessible to legislators, in both official languages, thus saving them time and money in searching and drafting legislation. Another objective was to demonstrate that Canada uses world-leading technology.

The Department had to modernize its statute and regulation management system in order to assist all the steps within the legislation process, to automate the steps that can be automated, to provide the Department's drafters and reviewers with more efficient access to legislation amendment requests, and to provide the general public visiting the Department's Web site with more efficient access to the statutes and regulations of Canada.

Proposed Solution

The Department of Justice of Canada requested an XML-based system to ensure document consistency, simplify exchange among the various users of the document management system and facilitate cross-media publishing of statutes and regulations.

The solution Irosoft has provided involves:

• a document management system based on the XML editor Arbortext Editor (formerly known as Epic), which has been customized to meet the Department's needs, and on the native XML database TeraText as XML document storage, which provides search capabilities and point-in-time access to statutes and regulations,
• a command tracking module for saving and managing statute and regulation amendment requests, applying amendment requests and saving a history of the amendments made to each statute and regulation,
• a module for generating Web pages, for exporting and converting statutes and regulations to HTML and PDF in order to publish them on the Department's public Web site.

Results

• Simplified data exchange among the various actors through each step of the publication process (drafting, reuse, review, publication).
• Automation of most of the manual review and consolidation operations.
• Fast and reliable publication of the consolidated statutes and regulations of Canada on the Web site.

Customer Satisfaction

"The professional members of Irosoft's innovative, dynamic technical team never back down from a challenge. With its knowledge and considerable experience in the legal sector, the Irosoft team was able to understand and even decode the requirements of DJC. Thus, Irosoft was able to recommend appropriate solutions in line with the users' needs.

Irosoft's representatives are committed to delivering quality service. As such, they were able to build and maintain strong business relationships in an ever-evolving work environment. Furthermore, they created an atmosphere of trust that still exists today."

Mr. Rémi Massé,
Legislation Access Manager (LIMS Project)
Legislative Services Branch, Justice Canada

Strengths

• Automated amendment requests tracking
• Amendment requests history
• Option of searching for all amendments to a statute or regulation on the Web site