Today we release major updates to some of our scrapers:
The Plenary scraper is a new addition to the family of parltrack scrapers. The plenary scraper comes with a whole new pdf-to-text back-end based on pdfplumber. We use this back-end to scrape all the amendments submitted to the …
The Greens/EFA in the European Parliament generously commissioned parltrack.eu to produce a scraper for the Committee Roll-Call Votes (RCV) that are mandatory to publish since a couple of years. Previously parltrack attempted to do so on its own, but failed due to to the diversity that unites these …
A few more moderate and advanced examples of queries on the no-db console.
You probably are sitting on hot coals now hoping for some juicy
datamining with python and our no-db console. But first let's have a
short digression showing a super-lightweight way of mining the
data. If you never heard of the amazing jq tool, it's high time (here's a nice tutorial …
So now you have downloaded at least one dataset, and in previous part you also set up the parltrack no-db console. Now what? how do you know what is in the dataset? For this to answer Parltrack publishes the "schema"s of the datasets on the dumps page. In the …
Last time we set up our no-db console and even made
our first query. We saw a mysterious IDXs object. But before we look
at this object, first let's look at another one:
The no-db console is based on 3 major objects. Metadata about the databases is …
It might not be obvious but the main goal of Parltrack is to liberate the data from the many horrible ways it is published by the European Parliament.
This website here where you can browse some of the data is an editiorialized interpretation. This website here is meant to …
A few dasy ago we got an inquiry from Mr Petrov who works for the EP "Directorate-General for Innovation and Technological Support, Data Management, Document Production Unit". We welcome the EPs interest in this topic, and are happy to answer these question to the best of our knowledge. Please see …
(Dutch version below)
on the importance and relevance of assistants of MEPs:
The Parltrack db contains the history of assistants to MEPs. In the last one year we got multiple attempts to have them removed under GDPR excuses (we rejected them and referred them to the dutch DPA). Assistants should …
On Saturday Parltrack received a request by an ex-assistant of an MEP to delete their name from our data. The name of this person we do not disclose because we respect their privacy in regards of this request which has no public interest value, however their position as an assistant …
The rewrite of Parltrack to version 2.0 aims at enabling better reuse of EU Parliament data, but also to make more sense out of it, for instance by keeping track of changes over time.
In Parltrack v1, Information related to Members of the European …
While every democratic institution's legitimacy relies on a duty of transparency, votes in the European Parliament have traditionally been very difficult to access and make sense of. Yet, a minute recording of such critical moments of parliamentary activity is essential for keeping …
Parltrack 2.0 attempts to make sense of the enormous mess of data comprised in the European Parliament (EP) website. By emphasizing "enormous mess" we actually mean that it sometimes feels like efforts have been put to ensure that this parliamentary data is not easily accessible, readable …
For the last year and thanks to the grant by the Dutch SIDN Foundation, Parltrack has been the object of a complete re-writing. We are proud to introduce Parltrack 2.0 to the world!
Browse our data by meps or by dossiers.
The general objectives of …
