2. Classification of User Requirements

2. Clarification of User Requirements

Chapter 2 clarifies the user requirements of the information development of legislatures of APPF participant countries.

2.1 User requirements

The following activities should be technically made possible, in order for APPF participant countries to serve parliamentary information (mainly, documents dealt within the parliament, such as legislation and official documentation) on the Internet.

to make available parliamentary information on the WWW in its original language
to exchange parliamentary information among APPF legislatures
to accept feedback from the receivers of parliamentary information, who access the information from all across the area.
to provide compatibility for the computer environment of the past
to provide less advantaged countries with support for parliamentary information development based on the experience and knowledge of advantaged countries.
to extend the system to other fields of application, such as administration and jurisdiction, in the future.

2.2 User requirements in detail

2.2 describes the details of user requirements in 2.1.

2.2.1 Development of Multilingual Parliamentary Information

Each legislature should begin information development activities with legislative information. One well-known example is seen at Thomas (http://thomas.loc.gov/home/thomas2.html). Parliamentary information, by nature, is best distributed by way of the Internet. However, most widely-employed computer systems are not well equipped to handle the wide range of languages which are used in the APPF region. For example, Japanese documents will be displayed illegibly on the screen of the Spanish-speaking computer environment, and Thai documents will be displayed totally unintelligibly on the Chinese-speaking computer. To guarantee that the international users will be able to read the documents released by the legislature of each country, the development of multilingual parliamentary information is necessary.

2.2.2 Standardization of Information Distribution

Each legislature will be responsible for distributing parliamentary information, so that the way they distribute parliamentary information will reflect their information access policy. However, in terms of the actual technology employed to distribute information, the development of separate original methods should be avoided, so that they will not end up being mutually incompatible. The multilingual distribution system should be standardized among the APPF legislatures. And, at the same time, the format of parliamentary information should also be standardized. The format should be machine readable, so that database functions, such as search and retrieve, will be possible and shared.

2.2.3 Support of the Feedback Channel

Information distribution needs to be supplemented by feedback from the information users, thus creating a cycle of distribution. This is true of parliamentary information. A feedback channel should be provided for the distribution system of parliamentary information. Here again, however, the monolingualism that the computer endows upon us will raise a problem. So, multilingual capability will be required for feedback mechanisms, such as electroni