Refer to legislative text in parameters and variables

[lamthuy]

Hi,
Is there any way to retrieve the parrallel text that correspond to the rule encoded? It will be useful for research on rule extract from text?

[nikhilwoodruff]

Hi @lamthuy - this is definitely possible. If it's just for manual inspection, you might find the tax-benefit system documentation site useful. But if you want to do this programmatically, you can also find the variable metadata using the simulation objects in IndividualSim and PopulationSim, for example:

from openfisca_uk import PopulationSim
sim = PopulationSim()
sim.model.tax_benefit_system.variables["income_tax"].label
>>> 'Income Tax liability'

[lamthuy]

Hi Nikhil,
Thank you for your quick response! What I meaned was this in the New Zealand case:

The Nz one is much better: http://nz.openfisca.org/ See for instance: http://nz.openfisca.org/variables/social_security__has_orphaned_child_in_family if you click on reference takes you here: https://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/1964/0136/latest/whole.html#DLM361606

That document tells us exactly from which part of the policy document the rule was created. So we have a full text description of the rule or formula.

[nikhilwoodruff]

Thanks for the reference @lamthuy - the NZ web app does indeed look very cool, and I like the expanded computation tree. It'd be nice to write something similar for the UK, and have some more rigorous referencing in the source code: where references are provided, they can be from a mixture of different sources, including gov.uk. The project is still in its infancy at the moment, so there's definitely more of this to be added.

[lamthuy]

Sure, if there is a direct reference link to the text for each coded rule, the reference will be very helpful.