In the last decade, there has been an increased interest in making government data open and easily accessible to the public. Technological advances in the area of semantic web have given rise to the development of the so-called Web of Data, which has invoked an even stronger focus towards such efforts. More recently, advances in the area of natural language processing through the use of deep learning provide technologies which enable the successful processing of textual data.

An important kind of government data is the data related to legislation. Legislation applies to every aspect of people’s living and evolves, continuously building a huge network of interlinked legal documents. Therefore, it is important for a government to offer services which make legislation easily accessible to the public, aiming at informing them, enabling them to defend their rights, or use legislation as part of their job. Towards this direction, many European Union (EU) countries have already automated the digitalization process by developing platforms for archiving legislation documents and offering on-line access to them.

Following the successful efforts of other countries throughout Europe, Nomothesi@ project aims at modernizing the way greek legislation is made public and providing high-scale legal services. We envision a new state of affairs in which ordinary citizens have advanced search capabilities at their disposal about legislation. We also envision that legislation is published in such a way that developers can consume it, and so that it can also be combined with other open data to increase its value for interested parties or people. Currently, there is no other effort in Greece or related decisions made by government institutions and administration alike which takes this perspective on legislation into considerations.

Based on the above principles, we developed Nomothesi@, a platform which makes Greek legislation available on the Web as linked open data. Nomothesi@ provides open access in a library of more than 12,000 pieces of legislation, interlinked with approximately 124,400 connections and over 8,000 unique entities, such as geospatial entities, persons, organizations and geographical landmarks (points of interest).

Similar initiatives abroad:

• Metalex Document Server (Netherlands)
• Legislation.gov.uk (United Kingdom)