[mountainair]

Please, oh please, make this a reality: "By classifying regulations using the same system that science librarians use to organize papers in agriculture, we can determine which scientific papers may form the rationale for particular regulations, and link the regulations to the papers that explain the underlying science."

I cannot begin to describe how incredibly useful this would be. Regulators rely on the information provided by regulatory attorneys to craft their policies, so it's critical that the attorneys have a deep understanding of the issues. And paid legal research tools just don't/can't/wont provide that sort of information. In this vein, it would be wonderful to include social sciences - topics like economics and finance. Perhaps SSRN is a good option.

[nl]

I work in related field(s) in the technical sense (ie, NLP/Knowledge Engineering etc, but not related to law or legal services at all).

Is this a real problem? Is it really as simple as some ontology linking?

[mountainair]

It's a problem I face almost every day.

The role of a regulatory attorney is to explain to the regulatory agency why they should do something (think: PPM in power plant emissions, high-frequency trading controls, restrictions on flight paths and requirements for airport construction, you name it, it's regulated). But the attorney doing the explaining is trained in law, not in whatever the technical subject matter is. So the attorney relies on his client's experts in the field for information. But if an attorney doesn't have a basic understanding of the technical aspects, he won't know what questions to ask to get the right details, and he won't be able to make meaningful strategy decisions. In turn, most regulatory agencies are required by law to make decisions based only on the documents and information provided to them in the hearing/filing process. And all those documents are prepared by attorneys. If the attorneys miss a detail, the regulatory agency misses it too.

I would envision this sort of tool as providing background that will allow the attorney to ask the right questions, rather than a complete education on the technical subject matter.