How is Point-in-Time different from Historical Versions?
TimeBase Point-in-Time uses innovative MALT XML technology enabling users to link to ANY point in time and follow the legislative journey through date-sensitive secondary materials, cases and amendment links attached at section level.
What is Point-in-Time?
Traditionally, many legislation users including lawyers, business people, Members of Parliament and government employees have prepared their own unofficial paste-ups of consolidated Acts in order to track the changes to the law. This is a difficult and labour intensive task involving the manual search of indexes and tracking of amending legislation through the Table of Amendments or other gazette references, followed by the physical assembly of text representing the current state of the law. The likelihood of error increases each time an amendment is applied, while the readability of the document is significantly reduced.
This is an important factor when talking about legislation which is point-in-time as it means that rather than needing to work out which version of the legislation contains the amendments you are looking to see (as most historical version providers claim), TimeBase Point-in-Time simply allows you to enter a date in the pre-defined range of the service and the entire service displays as if you were looking at all the legislation at that point in time.
How does Point-in-Time work?
Unlike Historical versions, our Point-in-Time documents are living documents, not static consolidations, meaning you can link to date sensitive information at any level – part, chapter, section or whole legislation – and this information is always being updated and added to each time a new Bill passes through Parliament or a new case goes through the courts.
The granularity of our consolidation process also means that each section could have a completely different scope date in the legislation and you would only be shown a snapshot of all these sections as they exists at the exact point in time that you have picked.