Expressing conditions in tailored brochures for public administration

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 paper 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.