The Register of Reporting Obligations of Enterprises (OR - Norwegian Abbr.) in Norway is by law and regulations authorised to monitor and assist all reporting obligations of enterprises. OR focuses on achieving correct and efficient reporting by identifying and reducing multiple reporting of identical information to government agencies. It has become the basis for a number of implementations of electronic reporting. The current solution has received a best practice award from the OECD (2002).

It has a database-founded repository of building blocks and a methodology for creating new building blocks. Currently all data submitted by companies to the governmental agencies are described using these building blocks. The methodology combines a system for handling metadata, data modelling and forms design. The result is exported to an XML Schema and an XForms specification published at a web-server.

Even though the system has won an award, there are some fundamental problems.

Overlap search identifies few identical data definitions. The reason is that besides item descriptions, information about format and form-specific information are also included in the XML Schema. Since external systems retrieve this information and generate forms based on this only, the "additional" information cannot be removed.

This "context" has produced a staggering 20 000 definitions. Reuse is limited due to the included "context" information, and each new electronic form causes the number of XML Schemas to increase.

Even if we could handle the enormous and ever increasing amount of definitions, some forms cannot be transformed to an electronic version due to an exponential increase of XML definitions.

The current solution combines the data description and layout information in one XML Schema description. This does not necessarily pose a problem, but because the XML Schema descriptions are the only output of our design process, this combination of information causes most of our problems above.

The obvious solution is to split the information modelling and the form layout design into two different processes. This will increase the possibilities for reuse since you can choose to reuse only the information model or the pre-designed form elements.

The information modelling is done by creating an ontology that covers relevant information objects. The resulting object attributes are defined to be the information carriers. This separation makes reuse possible across different forms and formats.

Both a common governmental ontology and disjoint ontologies for different domains pose challenges. To avoid this we choose a hybrid solution where we require common use of some information carriers. This allows for both locally adapted ontologies and reuse.

The form elements and form design are described using the same methodology as the information objects. All are stored in a database and made available for the applications used by the agencies to construct an electronic form. All steps in this model and design process are supported by a combination of customised and off-the-shelf software.