Decision: Regulation subjects

Thing	Info
Relevant features	Subject pages and search
Date started	2024-05-01
Date finished
Decision status	Draft
Summary of outcome

Background/context

We believe that if we enabled the following interactions, they could help some of our users with policy research:

• When a person looks at a subject page, they see relevant regulation sections in the list of items (alongside resources).
• When a person searches for some keywords, the regulation sections in the results are annotated with subjects (similar to resources).

We can't do this right now because we don't have data that answers the questions "What are the subjects related to a section?" or "What are the sections related to a subject?" We could build it: our devs would enable annotating regulation sections with subjects, and our SME would do the annotations.

We do have data that answers a different question: "What are the top subjects associated with the resources that are tagged to a section?"

Core questions

Can we use the answer to "What are the top subjects associated with the resources that are tagged to a section?" to also answer "What are the subjects related to a section?"

If not, is it worth building a way to annotate regulation sections with subjects?

What we know

Principles

Our users need accurate and comprehensive information for their policy research. If we can't provide information that is accurate and comprehensive, we need to either frame the information carefully so that users have the right expectations or not show the information at all. (As an example of careful framing, our statute page include links to SSA but notes it was last updated in 2019, and we observed that at least some users do notice that date.)

Value of these hypothetical features

In most cases, the regulations are well-structured with clear titles, and they are organized by topic in their own way. Subjects are less necessary for making regulations findable, compared to resources.

Value of "top subjects data"

For the purpose of displaying "top subjects of related documents" in sidebars, our SME is still reviewing the data, but we think we can have reasonable confidence in this feature being helpful if we limit it to showing subjects tagged to at least X documents (TBD, probably 5ish).

Assuming we use that kind of threshold, some regulation sections won't display any top subjects, and that's fine.

Feasibility of hand-annotation

We have so many parts, subparts, and sections that it would take a very long time to hand-annotate all of them with subjects, and our SME capacity is limited. There is not much value in less-than-complete annotation, because people expect to get reasonably comprehensive results if they look up a subject. For example, if a person looked up EPSDT and saw one of the related sections but not all of them, that could be confusing and reduce trust in eRegs.

Alternatives

We have heard more of this kind of user need (looking up stuff by subject) for statute citations than regulations.

We've considered enabling hand-annotation of subjects with related regulation and statute citations, to be displayed as a kind of caption at the top of the subject page (not as an item in the list). That could serve some of the user needs. But it would be a fair bit of work.

What we don't know

We're not sure how we would display regulations on the subject pages - they don't have dates, so by default they would go to the end of the list in alphabetical order with the other undated items.

Things we need to decide

Should we use the top subjects data for annotating sections?

Our SME does not think this data is usable for this purpose. [Need to add more detail here about why]

Should we hand-annotate sections with subjects?

Too much work for not enough value.

Should we hand-annotate subjects with related regulation citations?

Maybe, although it's unlikely to be a make-or-break feature for us. Probably more value in figuring out what we can do to make statute more navigable.

Consequences