Challenge Project

Living Topics

Connecting words, phrases, and terms in a legal context, in use for effective government

11

We have added TERMDAT capabilities to the concept, and worked together on the FEDLEXplorer project at Open Legal Lab 2023. Please use the GitHub Discussion if you have any further ideas or feedback on this challenge.

FEDLEXplorer
Open Legal Lab 2023 Sketching

The purpose of this challenge is to demonstrate how federal legislation data can be used in third-party products through the SPARQL endpoint

Challenge

Unsere Challenge besteht darin, den Puls der Schweizer Regierung zu fühlen, indem wir aktuelle Terminologiedatenbanken mit Daten und Publikationen der Verwaltungen kombinieren. Wörter, Phrasen und Begriffe im Behördenkontext haben eine Besonderheit: Sie beziehen sich oft auf juristische Konzepte und sind Grundlage für weitreichende Entscheidungen. Standardbegriffe (in der Informatik auch "benannte Entitäten" genannt) müssen gut definiert sein, oft mit einer rechtlichen Grundlage. Um mit diesen domänenspezifischen Vokabularen arbeiten zu können, werden sie in Terminologiedatenbanken organisiert - wie z.B. TERMDAT, ein Dienst des Bundeskanzleramtes.


Our challenge is to take the pulse of the Swiss Government by combining up-to-date terminology databases with data and publications of the administrations.

Words, phrases, and terms in a governmental context have a special feature: they often relate to legal concepts, and are basis of far-reaching decisions. Standard terms (also called “named entities” in computer science) need to be well defined, often with a legal basis. To be able to work with this domain-specific vocabularies, they are organized in terminology databases - such as TERMDAT, a service of the Federal Chancellery.

Screenshot of TERMDAT

The goal of this challenge - which continues the work started at the recent GovTech Hackathon - is to harness the expressivity of terminologies provided by TERMDAT and related databases, to create a high-quality and up-to-date map of current topics being addressed in the open publications of government.

"The Swiss Confederation currently has almost 40k employees (~36k full time equivalents). It is not only difficult for the citizens of Switzerland to grasp the breadth and depth of which topics are worked on, the same is valid for the employees within the Swiss Confederation. Therefore, it is important to have a good high-quality overview of the ongoing work and the change of focus in regard of ongoing themes globally. Conversely, the specialists working on the terminology database are not able to read all new texts being published every day and would welcome a tool which would allow them to harvest newly coined terms or terms being used in a new context or with a different translation. Finally, end-users of texts might want to be able to click on a given (technical) word and receive a definition of that word."

(From original Living Topics challenge by BK Federal Chancellery)

Screenshot of API docs, Jupyter notebook, search results.

Resources

Possible outputs

  • Simple list or feed (e.g. RSS...)
  • Directed graph dataset (Jena, Neo4J, ...)
  • Visualisation of topics (Vega, D3, ...)
  • Update Wikipedia for main concept
  • Propose a method to update Wikidata

Further ideas & related projects

Casemates
Open Legal Lab 2022 Launch

Vereinfachung und Verbesserung des Zugriffs auf den SPARQL-Endpoint «Casemates», um die Daten des Bundesrechts beziehen zu können

  • Open Legal Lab 22 - Project using BK data & RDF
  • GovTech - Parliamentary Data Project
  • Connect Parliament API Data : https://ws-old.parlament.ch/
  • Invite the wikimedia.ch / GLAM community to help with Semantic Web, e.g. https://tutorials.openglam.ch/
  • There is currently no sort order on termdata.ch - but via API you could see the latest edited or created topics
  • Are all terms referencing laws, or do some reflect documens from current activites of an administration? Some (e.g. medecin-conseil in English references an external site)
  • Whose job is it to keep track of the activities of various administrations? General secretary of the department. BK connects the general sectretaries. At the top is the Spokesman (André Simonazzi). How is quality controlled across languages and departments e.g. GovTech PR
  • Make it easier to compare the legal basis and structure of Swiss government with other nations, e.g. https://data.legilux.public.lu/metadata

Es geht los!

24.03.2024 10:39 ~ oleg

Research

Event finished

We are working together the Triple store/Fedlex team on the same APIs, from a different angle. First we will help set up a backend that could enable queries to multiple APIs in the same place.

30.04.2023 12:13 ~ oleg

Event started

Joined the team

30.04.2023 08:18 ~ oleg

Edited (version 13)

30.04.2023 08:12 ~ oleg

Joined the team

14.04.2023 06:39 ~ Raphael_Jeannerat_BK

First post View challenge

13.04.2023 14:05 ~ oleg

Challenge

 
Contributed 1 year ago by oleg for Open Legal Lab 2023
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