The principal areas of concern are the provision, in a form conveniently readable to humans or machines, of information and statistics about: Parliamentary informatics is carried on both by officials of legislatures and by private for-profit and non-profit actors, with motivations ranging from the administration of parliaments to lobbying and facilitating democratic discourse.
There exists substantial overlap with disciplines such as psephology and, as far as the text of successfully enacted legislation is concerned, legal informatics in general.
"[2] Akoma Ntoso (Architecture for Knowledge-Oriented Management of African Normative Texts using Open Standards and Ontologies) is an initiative of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA) that proposes an XML document schema providing sophisticated description possibilities for several Parliamentary document types (including bills, acts and parliamentary records, etc.).
[8] The United States Library of Congress created the Markup of US Legislation in Akoma Ntoso challenge in July 2013 to create representations of selected US bills using the most recent Akoma Ntoso standard within a couple months for a $5000 prize,[9] and the Legislative XML Data Mapping challenge in September 2013 to produce a data map for US bill XML and UK bill XML to the most recent Akoma Ntoso schema within a couple months for a $10000 prize.
OpenAustralia.org is a community-funded site which was launched in June 2008 and automatically collects and publishes in an easy-to-read format the transcripts of all Australian Government House of Representatives and Senate debates, questions, discussions and notices.
"Africa i-Parliaments" is the portal of the regional initiatives of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA) aimed at strengthening the role of African Parliaments in fostering democracy and good governance by developing common information services and tools, and building information management capabilities with the objective of making Parliaments i-nterconnected, i-nformed i-ndependent, or in short, i-Parliaments.
The project includes two main initiatives: Akoma Ntoso (Architecture for Knowledge-Oriented Management of African Normative Texts using Open Standards and Ontologies) proposes an XML document schema providing sophisticated description possibilities for several Parliamentary document types (including bills, acts and parliamentary records, etc.).
Akoma Ntoso defines a set of recommendations and guidelines for e-Parliament services in a Pan-African context and provides an enabling framework for the effective exchange of machine readable Parliamentary Documents such as legislation, debate record, minutes, etc.
KohoVolit.eu is a volunteer-run website providing a sample of votings both in the Lower and Upper Chamber of the Czech Parliament allowing the user to test her or his own preferences against the MPs.
Hvem Stemmer Hvad[11] has elaborate parliament voting statistics and tracks parliamentary questions and media mentions of politicians.
Kansan Muisti ("the memory of the people"), follows the Finnish Parliament and investigates whether the MPs votes in accordance with the promises made in voter advice applications before the elections.
Offenes Parlament[44] is a newer effort by the German chapter of the Open Knowledge Foundation, which allows citizens to search and subscribe to parliamentary documents and plenary transcripts.
The platform lets users comment, vote and emend on every parliament act, supplies official legislative text and rss feeds.
The site presents profiles of all members of Parliament, information about the MP's deeds and stances on public policy issues, bills and law proposals, questions to the Cabinet, interventions during plenary and committee sessions.
Every visitor of the site (without registration) is free to view the profiles of MPs and ministers, read their pre-election promises, blogs, overview of their on-line and media "footprint", which is updated automatically.
accounts) can ask questions, post their comments or replies, participate in discussions and use other interactive features of GudrasGalvas.lv[*] [*] Gudras galvas – "smart heads", words often used in Latvia when referring to the Parliament as an institution or its individual members.
Atviras Seimas (Open Parliament) provides statistics for MP attendance, votes, speeches, rebellions, travel maps, popularity ratings based on internet search result counts.
Mano Seimas (My Parliament) publishes voting records for interesting or controversial bills, provides MP's biography and allows to ask questions and receive answers from MPs.
Mano Seimas is a part of e-democracy project run by Institute of International Relations and Political Science, Vilnius University.
Manobalsas.lt (myvote) is a smart voting tool allowing users to take a test and find out which political party and candidate best matches their opinion.
Project Duma 2.0 is a social initiative aimed to improve the laws and to find in Internet effective ways of solving problems.
The aim of the project is not simply to inform officials about the citizens' decisions and initiatives, but lobbying of these ideas at the legislative level with the maximum of their application.
Adrian Moraru, deputy director with IPP said in an interview with mySociety explains how they have had to obtain much of their Parliamentary data by court action.
The application tracks the policy specialisation and the engagement in local interest representation of each MP and enables users to compare the activity of their representatives (one-to-one and one-to-all).
Moreover, Parlament Transparent allows specialised NGOs and ordinary citizens to keep track of the latest legislative developments in 15 policy areas.
Parliamentary Monitoring Group hosts news, documents, speeches, statements and press releases from committees in the South African parliament.
The official UK Parliament website provides transcripts of the Parliamentary debates and votes in plain text form, and these are parsed by a project known as parlparse into a timeline of publicly available structured XML files.
These files provide the data for TheyWorkForYou, which hosts the speeches in a user friendly form and creates email alerts and rss feeds, and Public Whip, which keeps track of the votes and allows for an expression of their meanings in plain English.
Independently of this, the academic Philip Cowley at Nottingham University researches specifically into how MPs vote through his Revolts website and publications.
The website Undemocracy[53] gives hyperlinked access to transcripts of the General Assembly and Security Council of the United Nations, with parsed voting records.