Disability Law Knowledge Management System

Meeting the Challenge, Inc. was awarded a three-year grant to develop a Disability Law Knowledge Management System. The goal of the Disability Law KMS project is to create a comprehensive knowledge repository for dissemination and utilization of disability civil rights information. The system is designed as a web-based, information portal.

This work builds on research conducted for the Disability and Business Technical Assistance Center (DBTAC) project. In that research a prototype knowledge management system was developed and tested with information specialists from the DBTACs. The prototype included a portion of the material available on the Americans with Disabilities Act. (See article from Federal Computer Week.)

The Disability Law KMS project expanded the earlier work in two important areas. First, it vastly increased the quantity of information in the knowledge base. And second, it expanded the use from the information specialist to the general public.

The knowledge base, the ADA Document Portal, currently holds over 20,000 indexed documents from many different agencies and organizations. The ADA collection includes approximately 3,500 documents. Additional collections include the Fair Housing Act, the Air Carrier Access Act, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, and Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, as well as agency collections for Department of Justice, EEOC, and the Access Board among others.