The Privacy Workstation

Abstract

This article presents the purposes and operation of The Privacy Workstation, a knowledge-based application on Australian privacy law, developed for both research and commercial purposes as part of the DataLex Project on legal expert systems. The Workstation aims to be a general-purpose tool for privacy law research, administration, or advocacy. Any single computing technique is unlikely to be adequate to such a task, so the Workstation software integrates three techniques: hypertext browsing, free-text searching, and rule-based inferencing. A user may use any combination of these techniques in their own enquiries using the Workstation.

The Workstation integrated three previous DataLex programs: • HYPE (v.2), a hypertext (or ‘text navigation’) engine; • AIRS (v.3), a text retrieval engine; • Y-SH (v.l), an inferencing engine.

YSH, AIRS and HYPE comprise the three ‘engines’ within the Workstation software, but with a new common interface.

This is the most comprehensive paper about the earliest version of the Workstation software and an application using it. The Privacy Workstation - User Manual is at http://ssrn.com/abstract=2993926

Keywords: Privacy, Data Protection, AI, Legal Expert Systems, Hypertext, Text Retrieval, Australia, Knowledge-Base, DataLex