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Open Access and Open Standards

Parliaments are major producers of data and information that is vital for the democratic wellbeing of a country and forms the lifeblood of political participation. Providing access to primary legal materials and parliamentary documents is not just a matter of providing physical or on-line access to them. In order to build a system that provides real access to parliamentary information and not just the "display" of information there is need to use structured markup, such as XML, to identify logical structures within the document. This allows for sophisticated searching, articulated retrieval and complex manipulation of information. The use of XML markup and metadata allows users to quickly identify meaningful aspects of the legislation in an understandable manner, e.g:

  • finding out from the debate records which MPs have debated on a specific issue;
  • finding out from legislation records the addressee to whom the legislation should matter;
  • finding out from legislation records the "penalty" or "consequence" of not abiding to that specific legislation;
In order to provide "Open access" digital documents need to be marked up with machine-readable descriptions that enable the addition of meaning/structure to the content, thereby facilitating automated information management by computers allowing users (MPs, the Executive, citizens, public administration and enterprises) to access and manipulate the information in the form that is most convenient to them. To achieve "Open Access" that also promotes the exchange of information and data across Africa and actually supports integration and harmonization the Bungeni Project promotes the adoption of standardized representations of data and metadata in the African Parliamentary, specifically AKOMA NTOSO - Architecture for Knowledge-Oriented Management of African Normative Texts using Open Standards and Ontologies. The AKOMA NTOSO framework initiative was developed as an essential pre-requisite for the development of a mature Parliamentary and legislative information system. It addresses information content structure and recommends document specifications for developing Parliament information systems across Africa. AKOMA NTOSO includes:
  • A common standard for data description;
  • Mechanisms for easy citation and cross referencing;
  • A common parliamentary metadata schema;
The development of AKOMA NTOSO in the context of Bungeni was meant to provide a solid foundation for the development of Parliamentary systems in African parliaments. The aim was to provide the technical specifications based on open international standards and common document models that would allow the development of information systems that are independent of any vendor or operating system and can easily communicate with each other. AKOMA NTOSO brings together the relevant specifications under an overall framework; IT management and developers now have a single point of reference to identify the required "open access" specifications that should be followed. By adopting these specifications in the design of Bungeni we can ensure interoperability between systems that are developed on any platform and with any application software that has been developed based on AKOMA NTOSO specifications. For further detailed information please see AKOMA NTOSO www.akomantoso.org "Akoma Ntoso" (linked hearts) is the symbol used by the Akan people of West Africa to represent understanding and agreement. Likewise, AKOMA NTOSO represents common standards that provide open access to parliamentary documentation and allow Parliaments to exchange information more efficiently, like "linked hearts"

Bungeni and Open Standards

The system is designed around open standards and all data generated by the system are stored as complete human-readable XML documents to provide high value information services, facilitate access to parliamentary documentation and safeguard long term accessibility and preservation of digital parliamentary records. The use of open standards for document management and storage allows for easy exchange and aggregation of Parliamentary information in addition to reducing the time required to make the information accessible via different electronic publishing media. It also allows for greater public access to information since the information is stored in non-proprietary formats allowing for flexibility in choice of document retrieval/reading tools. All components of the system avoid the use of proprietary standards either for communication with other components or for data storage. Bungeni:
  • uses XML document models based on AKOMA NTOSO framework recommendations (see www.akomantoso.org for more information).
  • the repository uses standards-based access to repository contents. The repository contents are stored as XML documents and the repository will emulate a filesystem-like hierarchical model to store and access the XML artifacts.
By using AKOMA NTOSO compliant XML document models in combination with the standard based repository storage of the XML documents, Parliaments ensure that there is no tie-in to a particular proprietary technology, standard or vendor product safeguarding the long-term creation, storage, search and retrieval of parliamentary documents.