The Themis system is an integrated drafting environment for legislation which automatically generates the wording of amending legislation in the textual amendment style. Themis provides the legislative drafter with a version of the Act or Regulation to be amended on which the drafter marks the amendments directly. From these marked changes, the system generates an amending Act or Statutory Rule which reflects those changes. The various phases in this system are discussed including the knowledge representation scheme used to represent amendments, the capturing of this knowledge, the process of producing wordings Prom the representation and the control of variant wordings.

This paper proposes an architecture for a system which accepts Amending Acts expressed in SGML and produces a database of resulting versions of the Principal Acts, and describes its implementation. It discusses the core natural language processing module which uses an ATN to parse the components of the Acts into a frame representation of amendment actions. This representation is then used to produce database transactions which add the subsequent versions to the database.

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We provide an overview of the Themis system, a commercial implementation of a digital library of legislation. !l'hemis uses SGML to store legislation. This allows a single source document to be exported in a number of different formats and presentations. Themis also allows access to different versions of legislation by specifying a point-in-time at which the law is required. We discuss how this is achieved in Themis and how versioning impacts the storage of fragments of documents and management of references within and between documents.

Semi-structured data, including but not limited to structured documents, has specific characteristics and is used in ways different to tabular data. SGML and XML are widely used to represent information of this type. The demands on systems that manage semistructured data vary from those on traditional relational systems. This paper reviews the nature and characteristics of semi-structured data, and the functional needs of those applications, including query requirements, document description, manipulation, and document management needs. It examines alternative physical models for semistructured data, and evaluates and compares alternative system architectures.