In this work, we are following the footsteps of other successful efforts in Europe and aim at modernizing the way the legislative work is offered to the public. In line with the goal of Di@vgeia, we envision a new state of affairs in which people have at their fingertips advanced search capabilities on the content of legislative work. We envision a paradigm of distribution of legislative work in a way that developers can consume, so that it can be also combined with other open data to increase its value in the interest of people. To the best of our knowledge, there is no other effort in Greece that takes this perspective on legislation and related decisions made by government institutions and administration alike.
We view legislation as a collection of legal documents with a standard structure. Legal documents may be linked in terms of modifications by and citations to others, reflecting rich semantic information and interrelationships. A modern country needs intelligent services which not only present the textual content of legal documents but are also able to answer complex questions such as “Which legal documents a certain person has signed during his service as Finance Minister?”, “Which legal documents have been modified and by whom?”, or “Retrieve the 10 most frequently modified legal documents between 2008-2013”.
To enable the formulation and answering of such complex questions, we have designed and developed a prototype web application, called Nomothesia, which offers Greek legislation in RDF as published in the Government Gazette. Greek legislation has been modeled in Nomothesia according to an OWL ontology that reuses the CEN MetaLex OWL ontology and extends it where needed to capture the peculiarities of Greek legislation. Nomothesia offers advanced presentational views and search functionality over the metadata and the textual content of Greek legislation. An important feature of Nomothesia is that it offers a SPARQL endpoint and a RESTful service that can be leveraged by developers for consuming its content programmatically and combine it with other open data. In this respect, Nomothesia opens a whole new market that can be developed based on semantic web technologies with direct societal benefits and great business opportunities.
Similar initiatives abroad:
