From: WELLE Klaus <...> Subject: Open Letter, re: machine readable data D(2014)10971 To: 'Stefan Marsiske' Dear Mr Marsiske, D(2014)10971 Thank you for your email of 4 February 2014 from yourself and the participants of the EP Hackathon 2014, regarding data produced by Parliament concerning its legislative activities, and the democratic value of producing and providing access to such data, notably for citizens. In particular, you highlight the importance of Parliament's technical decisions with regard to software, formats and standards used in order that the data provided by the institution might be as accessible as possible to citizens. You request access to the following software: CODICT, ACTES and ITER, and information about other databases that Parliament plans to open in the near future. Additionally you ask that data be provided in raw text formats (notably XML/ Akoma Ntoso). Before responding to your specific requests, I note that very similar requests(1) have also been introduced to the EP Register by a signatory of your letter, and that therefore you may already have indirectly received a response to your questions. I would also underline that Parliament's approach to open data is to make data available as much as possible, taking into account technical constraints. While Parliament is certainly an open institution, there are currently no rules regarding the formatting of data with regard to access for the general public. I welcome, therefore your recommendations, and hope that the following information goes some way towards answering your questions. The CODICT database centralises and standardises European Parliament internal data held or produced by the Parliament and data made available to IT Parliament's applications. The information contained in the CODICT contains personal data and therefore no access can be granted to this database. The ACTES database contains the results of votes in plenary, which are accessible to the public, in PDF and XML formats in the EP register(2). The ITER database is an internal tool used to process information relative to the legislative procedure (e.g. deadlines for amendments, amendment lists, and preparatory texts) and serves to stock all legislative texts before they are sent to translation services. The content of ITER, once translated, is sent to the EP electronic register of documents, and is therefore fully accessible to the public. With regard to the upcoming European elections in May 2014, please note that all the data relating to the results of the elections, and the data of previous EP elections, will be made available by Parliament on a dedicated website in XML format. This website will be launched in April, starting with the publication of the results of previous EP elections. Data relating to the 2014 elections will be published and updated as of 25 May 2014. I hope this information is useful to you, and I thank you again for your interest in the production of and access to EP data. Yours sincerely, Klaus WELLE (1) http://www.asktheeu.org/en/list/all?utf8=%E2%9C%93&query=dutoit&request_date_after=&request_date_before=&commit=Search (2) http://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegistreWeb/search/typedoc.htm?codeTypeDocu=PPVD -----Original Message----- From: Stefan Marsiske [mailto:s...] Sent: 04 February 2014 11:20 To: WELLE Klaus Cc: hackathon Subject: Open Letter, re: machine readable data Dear Mr Welle, On behalf of all participants of the EP HACKATHON 2014[1], I would first of all like to thank you for your email of 21 Jan 2014 [2] (A(2014)247-SG-EN) regarding the functionality of Parltrack and how it makes available data on the work of the European Parliament. We agree with you that this data is produced on a daily basis by the Parliament itself as a consequence of the work of its committees, its administration and secretariats, and perhaps most importantly, of its voting in plenary. This rich set of data is of great value, in particular when we analyse, visualise, correlate and systematise it. With modern statistical techniques and visualisation tools we make it possible to "see" democracy at work in ways one couldn't imagine a few years ago. This "visibility" brings us to the question of the quality of the software, the formats and the standards the Parliament is currently using. As far as we understand, you are personally responsible for ensuring that the Parliament's activities are conducted with the utmost transparency[3]. Therefore we ask you to support our efforts to help the Parliament meet its own statutory requirements in this regard. In particular, we would be grateful if you could provide full, accurate, timely, openly licensed, open standards-based, machine-readable access to CODICT, ACTES and ITER, and a list of all other databases and their interfaces which you plan to open for public query. It would already be very helpful if you could, as a first basic step, make data currently locked in PDFs also available in raw text format, or (preferably) XML/Akoma Ntoso[4]. We would be delighted to help and advise you further on how to find feasible and realistic solutions to allow the public to profit from the Parliament's data. We remain at your disposal and thank you for your efforts to make the European Parliament a front-runner in regards to transparency among the EU's institutions! with respect, EP HACKATHON 2014 organizers: Stefan Marsiske - Parltrack Xavier Dutoit - Tech To The People EP HACKATHON 2014 participants and supporters: Joel Purra - DFRI.se, AT4AM.eu Niels Erik Kaaber Rasmussen - api.epdb.eu Matilde Pinamonti Alexander Mikhailian - EurActiv Esther Durin Daniel Lentfer - Democracy International Michal Skop - KohoVolit.eu Martin Virtel - lobbyplag.eu, opengov.cat Matti Schneider Laetitia Veriter Christian Staat - Université libre de Bruxelles Adrián Blanco Juan Elosua Thomas Bouchet - La Quadrature du Net Joachim Gola - 4=1 GmbH Hamburg, eu-parlameter.zdf.de Chiara Girardelli André Rebentisch Olivier Hoedeman - Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO) Mauricio Nascimento - FSFE Fellowship Coordinator - BE Joris Vanhove Karsten Gerloff - President, Free Software Foundation Europe Geraldine Nethercott - Access Info Europe Paul Roeland Thomas Tursics Friedrich Lindenberg - Open Knowledge Foundation Deutschland e.V. References: [1] http://europarl.me/ [2] http://europarl.me/A2014_247-SG-EN [3] http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//TEXT+RULES-EP+20130701+RULE-103+DOC+XML+V0//EN&language=EN&navigationBar=YES [4] http://www.akomantoso.org/ An online version of this email is available at: http://europarl.me/open%20letter%20for%20open%20data%20Welle