Compliance with complex agricultural policy: the Premia Management Plan system

The development of knowledge based systems and decision support systems that provide advice on policy, law and legislation is still in its infancy. Such systems require a degree of expertise to be embedded within them. This paper describes the process of development of a compliance system that interprets a subset of the rules and regulations of the European Community's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), which is one of the most contentious pieces of wide-ranging and complex legislation in the world. The CAP legislation in Northern Ireland is complex and farmers find it difficult to interpret. For this reason a knowledge based solution was developed and implemented. The finished system illustrates the usability of high-level object-oriented development tools in the development of flexible knowledge based software.