A tool built with the Ministry of Law to detect overlap and conflict between Indonesian regulations, where the volume of instruments makes manual review impractical.
Role Engineer, Ministry Partner in Innovative Technology Transformation, with the Ministry of Law. Period 2025 to 2026.
Harmonisator detects overlap and conflict between Indonesian regulations. It was built with the Ministry of Law during the same partnership programme as FiskalLink and KUHPedia.
The problem it addresses is structural rather than exceptional. Indonesia has more than fifty thousand regulatory instruments, issued over decades by many different bodies, each one drafted by people who could not realistically have read all of the others. Contradictions are the expected outcome of that process, not a failure of it.
When two instruments conflict, the hierarchy usually decides which prevails: a ministerial regulation cannot override a statute, and a statute cannot override the constitution. That principle resolves the question in law.
It does not resolve it in practice, because someone has to notice the conflict exists. Until then both instruments are on the books, both are cited, and a citizen or a business complying with the one they found is exposed to the one they did not.
The cost of that lands unevenly. A large firm with counsel finds the conflict. A small business follows whichever document it happened to read.
The naive approach is to look for regulations covering the same subject and flag them. That produces enormous numbers of false positives, because most instruments on a shared subject are complementary rather than contradictory, and a tool that cries wolf at that volume is one nobody opens twice.
The difficulty is that conflict is a semantic relationship and not a lexical one. Two provisions can contradict each other without sharing vocabulary, and can share almost all of their vocabulary while being perfectly consistent. Detecting the difference requires representing what a provision requires or permits, not merely what it is about.
The other constraint is one this kind of tool cannot escape. The output goes to people who will act on it, so a flag has to point at the specific provisions in tension and let a human make the judgement. A system that concluded on its own that two regulations conflict would be making a legal determination, which is not a machine’s call.
Delivered inside the ministry partnership programme.
This page is short on purpose. The system detail belongs to a government partnership, and I have kept it to what I am comfortable publishing without clearing it first.