U.S. citizens will be able to understand and comment, via the Internet, on important new government regulations, thanks to a multidisciplinary Cornell team and a $750,000 grant from the National Science Foundation's Digital Government project that will support their work over three years.

The Cornell team will study sophisticated uses of information technology to help the U.S. Departments of Commerce and Transportation manage and monitor, via the Web, the creation of new government regulations. Team members are particularly interested in developing technological tools that will make it easier for those who write government rules to comply with the complex legal requirements for doing so; and for the public-comment process on proposed regulations to become more manageable. In addition, the team will study the internal agency process of rule making itself, collecting data on how the Internet may be changing that process.

The team includes co-principal investigators Cynthia Farina and Claire Cardie and team members Thomas Bruce and Erica Wagner. Farina is a professor at the Law School and an expert on regulatory law. Cardie is an associate professor of computer science in the Faculty of Computing and Information Science and an expert on natural language processing -- the science of creating software that can better organize human language for analysis. Bruce is director of the Law School's Legal Information Institute, which uses the Web to link the public to laws and court decisions. Wagner is an assistant professor at the School of Hotel Administration who is interested in information technology design and how it influences work life.

Under requirements of the E-Government Act of 2002, federal agencies are converting the rule-making process from paper to the Internet. The government Web site http://www.regulations.gov is to be the single Web portal for participation in all federal agency actions, including the process of publicizing and taking comments on proposed rules. This conversion is intended to make rule making more transparent and accessible to the public, as well as faster, more informative and more cost-effective for the agencies.

Farina, who teaches administrative law, says that many citizens, even law students, don't understand that "the regulatory process is different from the political process." Regulators must work out the real-life details of the laws that have been passed, she says, while those who implement the law need to know in-depth why people opposed to a proposed rule fear it might be harmful.

"Unsupported opinions are generally not useful to an agency, except for figuring out general sentiment," adds Cardie. "To make a decision, an agency needs data."

The Cornell researchers hope to design a comment interface that will educate and empower citizens to participate in policy-making as well as understand how the comment process works and what the legal and technical basis of the proposed rules are. In that context, the researchers will write software to help computers identify the unique individual comments that have more value to regulators than thousands of letters advocating for or against a particular rule.

Newly created software will help rule makers by indexing apparently unrelated statutes and executive orders to flag mandates relevant to the rules being written -- catching possible conflicts and contradictions.

Wagner, who will help evaluate user attitudes toward the software, says the project's interest in users reflects "an enlightened approach" that will increase the use and usefulness of the government Web site.

The team members' cross-disciplinary backgrounds make the team particularly well-suited for such a project, says Bruce. "Cornell is one of a very few places where one can find this particular array of expertise and mobilize it to help both government and the public."

In a year of sharply restricted funding, the Cornell team's proposal is one of only two in the e-rule making area to receive a major grant.