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

2. 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.

3. (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, …

4. 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, …

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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

8. 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

9. 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.

10. 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