Pressroom

Fresh Meadows, NY, Feb. 3, 2015 – Quicker and easier access to accurately drafted legislation is the reality now on the horizon for the Office of the Queensland Parliamentary Counsel (OQPC), Australia. This advance is due largely to the successful implementation of the authoring and conversion components of the eLegislation project. Absolute Data Group (ADG) partnered with Data Conversion Laboratory (DCL) to ensure the successful conversion of thousands of legacy documents.

“The old process of drafting legislation in unstructured FrameMaker and publishing PDF output is insufficient to meet the today’s goals of the Queensland Parliament,” said Tammy Halter, CEO of ADG. “DCL can easily handle complex conversions of great volumes of FrameMaker data, so they were the natural choice for this component of the project.”

The OQPC eLegislation project is designed to greatly improve public access to Queensland legislation and expand the range of higher quality associated legislative information. To achieve this goal, the OQPC challenged ADG to find ways to automate production and publishing processes for rapid and reliable delivery of comprehensive legislative information.

“Conversion of legacy content is not one-size-fits-all. Key to the successful conversion of OQPC’s large repository of FrameMaker documentation was DCL’s approach to analyzing the legacy data to understand the nuances, and carefully mapping them to OQPC’s legislative XML schema,” explained Mark Gross, President of DCL. “The other major ingredient was DCL’s expertise with an automated process, with just the right amount of human review to ensure high degrees of accuracy while keeping costs down.”

“The client stipulated a requirement for 100% accuracy in converting all legislative types, including Acts and Regulations, which have differing conditions and levels of complexity” Halter noted. “The initial trial conversion was so successful we became a little nervous as to whether the trial documents chosen were complex enough. By the end of Batch One’s 1,100 pages, which included the most complex piece of legislation, The Criminal Act, it was clear there was no need to be concerned. DCL got it right. It’s a pretty standard process for DCL, although the tagging is fairly complex.”

ADG delivered each converted batch to OQPC for extensive quality reviews. “We delivered the PDF generated from the structured/XML FrameMaker files, so OQPC reviewers could do PDF to PDF comparisons, which provided a higher comfort level to the reviewers who weren’t used to authoring or reviewing in a structured environment,” Halter added.

The conversion portion of the project, totaling over 90,000 pages, is expected to complete in March, 2015.