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OParl project for Linked Parliamentary Data [EDIT: now OpenGovLD]

EDIT: On July 4, 2014, I decided to no longer support OParl. The two reasons were:

  1. missing transparent decision processes
  2. a decision by OParl on that day to abolish JSON-LD conformance

I then forked the original OParl specification which was based on JSON-LD and created OpenGovLD. Further work on this specification will be done within the W3C Open Government Community Group and in collaboration with other relevant organizations such as the OKFN.


I only became aware of the W3C Open Government Community Group today.

A grassroots initiative named OParl is active in Germany with the aim to standardize the format of parliamentary data of councils of municipalities, city councils and other similar councils. The text on the website so far is only available in German, sorry, but the identifiers used in the specification are in English.

The initiative is already supported by the major German vendors of council information system software, several city administrations, IT-service providers and Open Data initiatives.

Last week an OParl-workshop decided to base the specification on the W3C standard JSON-LD. In other words: the intention is to create a specification for Linked Parliamentary Data.

One of the intentions of OParl is to extend the community of stakeholders and collaborators and the specification so that it can be used in other parts of the world. And at the same time state and national parliaments should also be able to use it to publish legislative data.

Looking forward to collaboration between OParl and the W3C Open Government Community Group !

4 Responses to OParl project for Linked Parliamentary Data [EDIT: now OpenGovLD]

  • Christian Tzurcanu

    Any chance to see the specs in English? At least the new JSON-LD ones you are working on. Please link to that.
    Thanks.

    Reply

  • Andreas Kuckartz

    I fear that it will take some time before there is some text available in English.

    The latest JSON examples (a week old) are available here:
    https://github.com/OParl/reference-server/blob/master/data.json

    The work is definitely not finished yet.

    Reply

  • Krzysztof Madejski

    What’s the need for OParl (in any serialization) if there is Popolo already?

    Reply

    • Andreas Kuckartz

      You would have to ask those in charge of the OParl project (oparl.org). As I stated in July 2014 I am no longer involved in OParl.

      But one can certainly ask if there is a need for OpenGovLD in addition to Popolo.

      My view: In the end I want to see a single machine readable specification (or set of specifications) which is based on Linked Data specifications and usable for almost all purposes everywhere.

      I am convinced that most of Popolo and OpenGovLD can and should be combined in a single spec. OpenGovLD simply reused all parts of Popolo where that seemed appropriate. And OpenGovLD deals with additional use cases which are not currently covered by Popolo.

      Reply

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