It’s traditional at the end of the year to look back and see where you started, and how far you have come. I’m going to extend the look back to 2020, because I started Computational Law Diary half way through 2020. A Little Personal Background I started my full-time career in computational law about…

Following up on the plan I wrote about a few days ago… By exposing all of the intermediate conclusions, and by adding separate variables that represent whether the primary variables are “known,” I’ve managed to create an encoding in OpenFisca that is capable of doing some cool stuff over the…

At Service Canada we are working on a new tool to help Canadians to plan for retirement. And we are experimenting with implementing that system using a Rules as Code approach. Specifically, we are looking at implementing the rules in OpenFisca. OpenFisca is a leading Rules as Code solution, but…

Responding to Catala Paper’s Criticisms of Logic Programming — Last December, Denis Merigoux and Liane Huttner presented a paper at the Algorithmic Law Symposium hosted at HEC Paris, on “Catala: Moving Towards the Future of Legal Expert Systems”. I’ve been meaning to take a look for some time, and finally managed it today. [Edit: Denis Merigoux notes in the…

Just had a great conversation with a colleague that helped me understand a challenges involved in implementing Rules as Code that hadn’t occured to me before. The objective in Rules as Code is to write an encoding of the legislation that is as re-usable as possible. That means avoiding the…

I blogged recently about the opportunity to use s(CASP) inside SWISH, the web-based development environment for SWI-Prolog. Today it is another web-based development environment for Rules as Code, OpenFisca inside Google Colab. What is OpenFisca? OpenFisca is probably the world’s most popular open source tool for Rules as Code. …

Rules as Code is a movement in public administration that suggests that the digitization of legislation, regulation, and other rules should happen as early in their life cycle as possible, so as to improve policy design, improve legislative drafting, and massively simplify service automation and building software systems compliant with…

In yesterday’s post, I talked a little about how it would be nice if there was a way to use legislative scope to refer to sections of law, particularly to implement, in a structurally-isomorphic way, defeasibility statements like “subject to this act and the regulations.” Today I’m going to share…

I’m currently working within Service Canada’s Benefits Delivery Modernization Program, and I’m working with a team that is looking to automate calculations under the Old Age Security Act. I have been looking at various approaches for encoding the relevant sections of the Act, and over the last couple of days…