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Parliamentary informatics
Parliamentary informatics is the application of information technology to the documentation of legislative activity. The principal areas of concern are the provision, in a form conveniently readable to humans or machines, of information and statistics about:
Parliamentary informatics is carried on both by officials of legislatures and by private for-profit and non-profit actors, with motivations ranging from the administration of parliaments to lobbying and facilitating democratic discourse.
The division of activities between official and unofficial activity differs widely between polities, even within a single country. There exists substantial overlap with disciplines such as psephology and, as far as the text of successfully enacted legislation is concerned, legal informatics in general.
The use of parliamentary informatics is also a rapidly growing trend in parliamentary monitoring. In a September 2011, joint report from the National Democratic Institute and World Bank Institute, a survey of parliamentary monitoring organisations (PMOs) found that parliamentary informatics are used by approximately 40 percent of PMOs worldwide. The report states, "These tools can automatically aggregate and organize information from parliamentary websites and other information sources, generate visualizations (such as political finance maps), and create new platforms for citizens to interact with MPs or participate in parliamentary monitoring and policy analysis."
Access to parliamentary information is the most significant issue in parliamentary informatics; access may be inhibited technologically through the provision of parliamentary information in a form not amenable to processing by machines, or legally, by copyright or other protection of the parliamentary record.
Ultimately, it may be possible to provide citizens with a comprehensive overview of all the legislation going through parliaments everywhere in the world, which would allow the tracking of the implementation of international treaties and of general legislative trends.
In a September 2011 report from the National Democratic Institute and World Bank Institute on parliamentary monitoring organisations, open data is cited as a fundamental issue for further development. The report explains, "While they have proven effective in many instances, the most useful informatics tools require the availability of parliamentary data in machine-readable or "open data" formats, which remains a challenge in many contexts."
Akoma Ntoso (Architecture for Knowledge-Oriented Management of African Normative Texts using Open Standards and Ontologies) is an initiative of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA) that proposes an XML document schema providing sophisticated description possibilities for several Parliamentary document types (including bills, acts and parliamentary records, etc.). The work will provide the basis for the OASIS Legal XML LegalDocumentML project. Legal bodies such as the European Parliament, the European Commission, the EU Publication Office, the UK Parliament, the Scottish Parliament, the Italian Senate, the Parliament of Uruguay, the Library of Congress of Chile, the Official Journal of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, the German federal executive bodies alongside the federal legislative journal as well as several agencies within the United Nations have initiated projects to digitalize their legislative systems by developing application profiles of the Akoma Ntoso (AKN) legislative document standard. The "United States Legislative Markup" (USLM) schema for the United States Code (the US codified laws) was designed to be consistent with Akoma Ntoso. Akoma Ntoso was explicitly designed to be compliant with CEN Metalex, one of the other de facto standards besides Akoma Ntoso, which is used in the UK Statute Law Database. The United States Library of Congress created the Markup of US Legislation in Akoma Ntoso challenge in July 2013 to create representations of selected US bills using the most recent Akoma Ntoso standard within a couple months for a $5000 prize, and the Legislative XML Data Mapping challenge in September 2013 to produce a data map for US bill XML and UK bill XML to the most recent Akoma Ntoso schema within a couple months for a $10000 prize.
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Parliamentary informatics AI simulator
(@Parliamentary informatics_simulator)
Parliamentary informatics
Parliamentary informatics is the application of information technology to the documentation of legislative activity. The principal areas of concern are the provision, in a form conveniently readable to humans or machines, of information and statistics about:
Parliamentary informatics is carried on both by officials of legislatures and by private for-profit and non-profit actors, with motivations ranging from the administration of parliaments to lobbying and facilitating democratic discourse.
The division of activities between official and unofficial activity differs widely between polities, even within a single country. There exists substantial overlap with disciplines such as psephology and, as far as the text of successfully enacted legislation is concerned, legal informatics in general.
The use of parliamentary informatics is also a rapidly growing trend in parliamentary monitoring. In a September 2011, joint report from the National Democratic Institute and World Bank Institute, a survey of parliamentary monitoring organisations (PMOs) found that parliamentary informatics are used by approximately 40 percent of PMOs worldwide. The report states, "These tools can automatically aggregate and organize information from parliamentary websites and other information sources, generate visualizations (such as political finance maps), and create new platforms for citizens to interact with MPs or participate in parliamentary monitoring and policy analysis."
Access to parliamentary information is the most significant issue in parliamentary informatics; access may be inhibited technologically through the provision of parliamentary information in a form not amenable to processing by machines, or legally, by copyright or other protection of the parliamentary record.
Ultimately, it may be possible to provide citizens with a comprehensive overview of all the legislation going through parliaments everywhere in the world, which would allow the tracking of the implementation of international treaties and of general legislative trends.
In a September 2011 report from the National Democratic Institute and World Bank Institute on parliamentary monitoring organisations, open data is cited as a fundamental issue for further development. The report explains, "While they have proven effective in many instances, the most useful informatics tools require the availability of parliamentary data in machine-readable or "open data" formats, which remains a challenge in many contexts."
Akoma Ntoso (Architecture for Knowledge-Oriented Management of African Normative Texts using Open Standards and Ontologies) is an initiative of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA) that proposes an XML document schema providing sophisticated description possibilities for several Parliamentary document types (including bills, acts and parliamentary records, etc.). The work will provide the basis for the OASIS Legal XML LegalDocumentML project. Legal bodies such as the European Parliament, the European Commission, the EU Publication Office, the UK Parliament, the Scottish Parliament, the Italian Senate, the Parliament of Uruguay, the Library of Congress of Chile, the Official Journal of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, the German federal executive bodies alongside the federal legislative journal as well as several agencies within the United Nations have initiated projects to digitalize their legislative systems by developing application profiles of the Akoma Ntoso (AKN) legislative document standard. The "United States Legislative Markup" (USLM) schema for the United States Code (the US codified laws) was designed to be consistent with Akoma Ntoso. Akoma Ntoso was explicitly designed to be compliant with CEN Metalex, one of the other de facto standards besides Akoma Ntoso, which is used in the UK Statute Law Database. The United States Library of Congress created the Markup of US Legislation in Akoma Ntoso challenge in July 2013 to create representations of selected US bills using the most recent Akoma Ntoso standard within a couple months for a $5000 prize, and the Legislative XML Data Mapping challenge in September 2013 to produce a data map for US bill XML and UK bill XML to the most recent Akoma Ntoso schema within a couple months for a $10000 prize.