Issues arising from the specification of an information acquisition and analysis toolkit for policy makers in governmental and legislative institutions

We describe the issues arising from the initial specification of a web-based toolkit that comprises different types of information retrieval and analysis tools. It is specifically intended for policy makers in governmental and legislative institutions, to help them research subjects of a policy in question, but the tool is general in its nature and could be applied to other domains. The major focus of this paper concerns issues arising from the initial requirements gathering for the toolkit, by consultation with its target user community. Sifting through a deluge of information available in the Internet and whether search results can be trusted are key important themes. There is also the challenge of "unknown unknowns" — relevant information exists that the policy maker simply does not know about, so there is no way of even beginning to search for it. The paper discusses how these challenges can be met.