Περίληψη: | In Parliaments there are huge amounts of knowledge concerning public policies for addressing social problems and needs, which is however contained in numerous long textual documents (e.g. drafts, laws, justification reports, discussions’ minutes, experts’ reports), and it cannot be exploited to a good extent. Its full exploitation necessitates an appropriate structured representation of it. In this paper, initially we analysed the legislation formulation process of the Greek Parliament and its main documents from a public policy perspective, focusing on the knowledge they contain on social problems and needs, and on public interventions (e.g. regulations, programmes, services provision, infrastructure building) for addressing them. Based on the conclusions drawn from this analysis we developed a methodology for the codification, representation and management of the policy related knowledge of Parliaments, which is founded on a well established product of CSAV research, the Issue-Based Information Systems (IBIS) framework. A first application of this methodology has been made for the whole set of documents produced for the Law on the ‘Contracts of Voluntary Cohabitation’ passed by the Greek Parliament. It was then evaluated using both quantitative and qualitative techniques based on the ‘Technology Acceptance Model’ (TAM). The evaluation concluded that the above representation/codification includes to a good extent the substantial elements of the policy related knowledge contained in the Parliamentary documents, and it is understandable by the users. At the same time it revealed weaknesses that lead us to the development of an extension of the IBIS framework in order to achieve a better representation of this knowledge. |