Strategic Choices
Document Actions
4.8. Dissemination
| 4 |
Features
|
Increasing accountability and transparency within the parliaments is a key goal of Bungeni, and Parliamentary Reporting is critical tool to achieve those goals. A number of reports are used by African parliaments on a day-to-day basis. Creating reports can be a painstaking and expensive task.
Each parliament has an established print layout, numbering scheme, and complex set of typographical conventions and the online rendering of such documents is at times challenging.
To make the publishing and distribution process more efficient, the system can be configured to present specific reports which are richly formatted to reproduce online the existing layouts, and it is also capable of rendering all parliamentary documents as PDF files in a format that matches established print formatting.
The document retrieval mechanism is largely guided by the XML Repository and its retrieval and querying mechanisms. Documents will be made available in different formats and have multiple access mechanisms as illustrated in the following table.
| Retrieval Type |
Plone |
Relational Database | XML Repository |
| Documents which are "works in progress" - i.e. not yet published - like Bills, Debate Report, Questions, Motions etc.. |
Stored and Retrieved from within the Plone repository using appropriate portlets, workspace interfaces. |
n.a. |
n.a. |
| Published Documents |
The most current version of the published document is available within Plone. Past versions may be available via CMFEditions. Only the originating format of the document is stored within Plone (not ANxml, or PDF versions) |
Metadata
about published documents is retrievable from the Registry. Associated
metadata like Ontology term lists, and lists of MPs are also available
within the registry. The registry also maintains a time-stamped history
of the metadata. |
The transformed ANxml of the published document is stored in the repository. (PDF and other formats of documents will also be stored along the same URI path). They are served and rendered for display by the repository engine. |
| Retrieval of Historical documents. Example: A Debate Report is displayed in the portal - clicking on an MP's name in the Debate Report, retrieves all the speeches made by that MP, or contributions made by the MP in other parliamentary documents. It must also be possible to retrieve all past references to the MP from previous parliaments (the MP could have been referred to as a Minister). |
Bungeni portal serves a proxy for querying the XML repository. |
Historical metadata of all portal information is available within the Registry. If a Person was an MP in a certain parliament, and a Minister in another, the registry will maintain time-stamped information related to the person's tenures. Similary if a ministry has undergone transformation over the years into different names, additional portfolios, etc. this information will be stored in the registry. |
The
XML repository stores indexed ANxml. The ANxml is stored in
hierarchical folder-type collections which mimic the URI path structure. Speeches made by a particular MP are retrieved using XPath style queries by querying for the ID of MP which is recorded as an attribute on the speech element. The ID can also be resolved to past IDs of the MP, since the current ID and the past ID are connected by the URI. Each of the past IDs will be queried for in the XML repository to retrieve the full history of speeches made by the MP. (The Past IDs of the MP can be retrieved from the Registry.) |
| Full text searches |
Plone can perform full text searches on work-in-progress documents. | n.a. |
XML repository will perform full text searches on the body of historical documents and current published documents. |