[okfn-bg] Bulgarian Parliament Open Data

Thu Dec 1 16:58:53 UTC 2011

Hello,

I recently updated the scraping software that gathers information on
the Bulgarian parliament. While they release some open data, it's in
bad XML form and not full. I've fixed it, added data from the website,
linked it and remixed it. It has 7400 data points and is 56Mb (11Mb
zipped). The current data is from the last 10 years. The data
includes:

- MP profiles - general bio, , supported bills, absences, external
consultants, participation in groups, committees and previous
parliaments
- Data on bills - laws, law propositions, decisions and official
declarations; links to texts, bill history, etc.
- Parliament groups - members, proposed bills, changes of members over
time, consultants
- Parliament committees - members, discussed bills, documents, changes
of members over time, consultants
- Parliament committee sittings - when, where, attending MPs, what
points were discussed, transcripts and resulting reports
- Parliament delegations - members, changes of members over time
- Parliament friendship groups - members
- Parliament procurement data - all public procurement requests with
dates, description and procurement registry numbers
- Inverse lookup lists on all of the above.
- XSD describing the XML data.

You can find all this on:
http://parliament.yurukov.net/index_en.html
Here's all the data:
http://parliament.yurukov.net/data/data.zip
And this is the scraping code as open source project:
https://github.com/yurukov/Bulgarian-Parliament-Open-Data

What is missing in this data is transcripts from the plenary meetings.
There's data on those for the past 20 years, but it's not indexed. I'm
working on scraping/indexing those. I've also set up a cron job to
update all the data above twice a week. The content of bills and
transcripts is in Bulgarian, but the structure and tags is in English.

Regards,
Boyan Yurukov

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Boyan Yurukov
Twitter: yurukov
http://yurukov.net/blog
http://lipsva.com
http://crime.bg