Knowledge engineers have been working in the legal domain since the rise of their discipline in the mid-eighties of the last century. Traditionally their main focus was capturing and distributing knowledge by means of the knowledge-based systems, thus improving legal access. More and more legal knowledge engineering has become an analytical approach that helps to improve legal quality. An example is the POWER-approach developed in a research programme that is now finished. This programme was run by the Dutch Tax and Customs Administration (DTCA in Dutch: Belastingdienst) and some partners. The POWER-approach helped to improve quality of (new) legislation and codify the knowledge used in the translation processes in which legislation and regulations are transformed into procedures, computer programs and other designs. We experienced that despite these clear benefits implementation proved to be far from easy. In fact the implementation phase still continues. Adapting research results in public administrations is a tedious process that takes lots and lots of energy and requires continuous management attention. Learning at organisational level proved to be much harder than we thought.
Prof. dr. Tom M. van Engers is Professor in Juridical Knowledge Management at the Leibniz Center for Law of the University of Amsterdam. He studied Cognitive Artificial Intelligence at the Utrecht University 1990-1994 where he graduated in two specialisations; Cognition and Representation and Cognitive Ergonomics. Van Engers received his PhD in 2001 for the thesis Knowledge Management; the Role of Mental Models in Business Systems Design at the faculty Mathematics and Information Sciences at the Free University in Amsterdam.
Van Engers works at the Ministry of Finance since 1983. From 1983 he worked at the Automation Directorate (Directie Automatisering der Rijksbelastingen (DAR)) at the Development Department (Bureau Ontwikkeling Automatiseringsprojecten). He works as Manager Research at the Project Organisation Artificial Intelligence and Audit Automation from 1990 until 2000. In that period he was the responsible project manager for many innovative projects (e,g, risk detection, natural language processing, data mining and digital intelligent agents on the Internet). Van Engers represents the Ministry of Finances in the interdepartmental working group Knowledge-based Systems from 1999 until 1996. From 1996 until 1999 Van Engers is co-chair of the Knowledge Management working group. From 2000 on he works for the Design department (Centre for Process and Product Design) as programme manager for the research programme POWER (Programme for and Ontology-based Working Environment for Rules and regulations).