Open Data for Legislation

Facilitating Transparent and Accessible Legal Information

Data management is at the heart of modern government.

Leveraging our expertise in semantic technologies and public data management, we engage in various areas to ensure that our government and institutional clients effectively implement new data collection and publication policies.

 

Cognizone has been at the forefront of revolutionizing how legislative data is organized, described, and published since 2015. Collaborating with prominent entities like the Service Centre de Législation (SCL) and the Chancellerie Fédérale Suisse (ChF), our initiatives have centered on structuring legislative data for seamless interpretation by both humans and machines.

Our contributions involve the support for:

  • Establishing automated processes for collecting and publishing legislative data.

  • Implementing automated processes to collect and publish operation and performance-related data, meeting publication requirements.

  • Implementing and deploying databases or data ecosystems.

 

Our goal is to provide consultative and technical expertise to support decision-makers in achieving their objectives. And our involvement spans various facets of legislation:

  • Fragmented Public Data: Addressing the challenge of data published across multiple public authorities.
  • Data Schemas: Encouraging public authorities to share their data schemas.

All data collected or published by public institutions and governments, ranging from GDP statistics to MPs’ expense data, is a result of deliberate decisions made in this regard. Collaborating with partners and experts, we endeavor to shape new policies and legislation, encouraging different facets of the government to produce more relevant and useful data in specific areas.

 

 

Data for good

We believe that judicious use of data can straightforwardly support:

  1. Successful Policy Implementation: Assisting policymakers in achieving their goals while minimizing the risk of costly setbacks.

  2. Innovation: Enabling broader data availability for reuse and innovation by various stakeholders.

  3. Scrutiny and Transparency: Detecting fraudulent activities and offering insights to MPs and other stakeholders to assess policy efficacy.

LegiLux and Legi4CH projects

Describe, organize and publish data in a meaningful way

The LegiLux and Legi4CH initiatives represent a pivotal step toward fostering open and accessible legal information within their respective countries.

LegiLUX

Empowering the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, LegiLUX introduces a platform facilitating the retrieval and reuse of legislative content and metadata.

Legi4CH

Integral to the “Fedlex” project, Legi4CH focuses on modernizing the Federal Chancellery platform to publish federal legislation, with a strong emphasis on data reuse and adherence to Semantic Web principles.

The “Casemates” project, orchestrated by the Ministry of State – Central Legislation Service, aligns with the W3C-defined approach for open data utilization. This approach is oriented towards the Semantic Web or Linked Data perspective.

Chart of the LegiLux application ecosystem with casemates at the center. And around, in different bubbles, OJ with Legal value, Eurlex, Projets application, Legiwrite application, ELI, Tool for users, Directives application and Traité application. The objective of this ecosystem are improve quality and reduce errors, efficiency and reduce costs.

The main benefits of the implementation of Casemates are:

  • ELI standard makes information flows more efficiently and reduces the time required to publish legislation
  • ELI standard promotes transparency
  • Better access to legislation and more reliable legislative data
  • Interrogate the metadata describing projects and legislative texts as well as controlled vocabularies and recover results in different formats including CSV, HTML, RDF…
  • Increased interoperability
  • Open web-applications to visualize and discover the Luxembourgish legislation

The data.legilux.public.lu initiative is instrumental in allowing the retrieval and reuse of both content files and descriptive metadata associated with Luxembourg’s legislation and legislative projects.

Legi4CH, as a segment of “Fedlex,” is currently undergoing modernization to facilitate the publication of federal legislation. The platform encompasses crucial publications like the Official Federal Gazette, Official Compilation of Federal Legislation, and the Classified Compilation of Federal Legislation, consolidating federal legislation and international law texts.

A primary objective of the Legi4CH project is to facilitate data reuse within the federal legislation platform, aligning closely with the Semantic Web and Linked Open Data principles outlined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

Our Focus and Contribution


While we don’t engage in privacy or ethics aspects, we are committed to supporting successful policy implementation, data governance, semantic and knowledge graphs solutions, and transparency through improved data collection and publication.

Read more about LegiLux in this article: Beta Legilux

Partner with Cognizone for innovative solutions and expertise that improve your data knowledge, and connectivity and drive transformative initiatives.

Contact us now to explore how our open data expertise can fuel your initiatives.