[Open-Legislation] Converting fun / european rules

[Stefan Sels]

Hi folks,

I started playing around with german transcripts from the Bundestag.

It is purely experimental, just to see how the current tools convert, 
its done with pdftotext and pdftohtml.

Original:
http://tronicum.org/docfnord/bundestach/17085.pdf

Txt:
http://tronicum.org/docfnord/bundestach/17085.txt

Html:
http://tronicum.org/docfnord/bundestach/17085.html

The Conversions show that within the German Stuff the two column layout 
sucks. The pdf2txt scopes with that pretty well, but e.g. simple 
comments to the speakers are inserted with

"(Somebody adds a sentence to speaker [PARTYNAME])"

So that is not distinguishable from normal paranthesis. I know this is 
wishful dreaming but they would need to provide XML or get their 
documentation better in my opinion. It is a similar problem like mixing 
up programming or HTML code with layout.

Can anybody make examples how laws or transcripts are done from their 
local government?

Is there a way to actually make a law (rule, whatever) proposal on EU 
level how local parlaments should document their work? Like Germans love 
to have rules, if we would have an European rule on howto document 
eGovernmental works, that would even force the countrys to give us the 
data in the format we want.

I repeat, this is wishful dreaming, but if we think like them (making 
laws to fix broken old laws), is it not possible to fix the lack of good 
documention of law making by lobbying them to fix their process?

Greetings from Colonge,
    Stefan