Open data in the Parliament Experiences and challenges Vaclav Sklenar Parliament of the Czech Republic

OpenDefininition.org: to provide computer readable, structured, freely available to everyone, without limitation for other reuse and redistribution Reason for demanding open data: to allow independent review of data, to create new services and allowing to connect to other data Governmental institutions have a lot of data, mainly gathered during their work and by laws from citizens/taxpayers On the other side, they can provide the data back to the public Providing the data can boost use of them in many different ways, make them available in many new contexts: users can connect the data with its own and so on.

(Open) Data in the Parliament: what can be offered Voting records: how the single MP’s voted and all agenda connected (political group membership, ..) Legislative process data: new laws, amendments, the processes connected (in which state the document is, which committee will be discussing it or discussed it, ..) Session Agenda: during the sessions, the state of single items of agenda, expected time of start of discussion on the item Collection of Bills and connected agenda: the law after approving became part of the Collection of Bills and must be connected to original document discussing in the Parliament; also: new draft bill propose to amend/cancel some bills and this should be searchable MP’s data: memberships in committees, commissions, …

Data in the Parliament: to whom to offer The other chamber: exchange of legislative data can allow to have full overview on legislative process Research institution inside Parliament: for they work, they need special reports and statistical data to measure or analyse legislative processes Political groups: political parties often have their own informational services supporting discussion on the agenda inside the group and they need to use the data Research institutions outside Parliament: often in the field of Political Studies or Economics – using the data for analysis Interested companies: for example, makers of Law Informational Systems, legal agencies and firms, …

Data in the Parliament: how to offer Do nothing: people can parse the HTML pages for their needs Reports on the demand: for every request, create special report in the special format, tailored to request Special report page on the web: create other view on the data, without graphical elements and in structured format Snapshot of the (part of) database: provide structured data, consistent, can be transformed to XML API for getting the data: for complex request or for accessing single objects (like SOAP and other protocols), in XML Time aspect: data can be provided on-line, covering the actual state or off-line, valid at certain time Size aspect: to ensure constistency, all connected data must be transferred – it means a lot of data

Data in the Parliament: why to offer Cooperation with the other Chamber: providing better service Ease our work: allowing access to the data, the number of requests for data will drop Political pressure: interest groups can make requests to MP’s and MP’s create pressure To support interested parties: interested citizens, NGO’s, commercial and law companies – all need data for their purposes It’s trendy and modern: also Parliament can be on the bleeding edge of development, can catch the trends or even setting the trends

Data in the Parliament: some problems connected licence: to offer the data, we must create or use the right licence complexity: when starting to offer data, it will not stop until majority of data is offered – mainly due to relations between data and overall complexity of informational systems of Parliament documentation: offering data means creating a lot of text, mainly on the system level, different from the documentation the Parliament have disclosure: offering the data means disclosure of data structure and can be used for better understanding for possible attacks support: data needs support and responding to questions on their meaning loss of control: data will live their own life without supervision

Data in the Parliament: some connected problems structure of data: a need to make changes of structure of data to both internal database and exported data documentation about versions of data

Data in the Chamber of Deputies using special reports, special HTML pages and database dump Special reports: mainly on constant queries (statistics of legislative process) Special HTML pages: some HTML pages have a parameter allowing export in CSV or in more structured form (for example, list of draft bills) Database dump: new service, offering majority of data. Data are in UNL format (like CSV, delimiting character is pipe |), one line for one row in table.

How the public use our data Direct access: they access and download the page or .zip files and do the format transformation on their own Indirect access: they use service of kohovolit.eu, which transform data to REST format and then use this data