[Open-Legislation] Reply to: API for EU legislation

Tue Jun 21 18:34:01 UTC 2011

dear Nils Erik, dear fellows,

On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 03:57:04PM +0200, Niels Erik Kaaber Rasmussen wrote:
> >(disclaimer: as there's no exisiting viable free alternative i feel
> >obliged to
> >develop one myself. i also hope to compete on the comptetition
> >with this)
> 
> We are looking forward to see what you come up with. Maybe it will
> be possible for us cooperate in combining the datasets at a later
> state.

i'm proud to announce parltrack: http://parltrack.euwiki.org/ - currently we
focus on the EP legislative pipeline: scraping dossiers from oeil, meps,
committee meeting agendas and voting results. all data is available as a json
dump from mongodb (http://parltrack.euwiki.org/dumps), individual pages are
all available as json, and there are rss feeds for new and changed dossiers.
the most important feature is the monitoring feature, that sends notifications
about any changes in details for dossiers. primary goal is to provide a tool
for policy advocates to intervene more efficiently in the legislative process.
it has been heavily influenced by tratten: http://euwiki.org/Tratten - thanks
ehj!

i intend to combine this with pippi longstrings (http://pippi.euwiki.org/all),
so that we have text analysis supporting activist with new incoming docs. also
we joined forces with pudo, who has a similar solution for the german
bundestag, and we're working with laquadrature du net on politicalmemory2,
which will cooperate with parltrack on many aspects.

the code is free under the AGPLv3: https://github.com/pudo/parltrack/
the scrapers are available as standalone versions as well:
https://github.com/pudo/parltrack/tree/standalone/parltrack/scrapers

enjoy, join, comments welcome!

cheers,s

ps: congrats Niels Erik for a well deserved 2nd place!
ps: i enjoy running custom queries on it, like what dossiers where spearheaded
by hungarian meps - turns out they're quite heavily focused on budget issues.

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