Dutch Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations has published the ‘Linked Data Overheid’ (LiDO) framework under the European Union Public License (EUPL), making it another open source public service tool. The Knowledge and Exploitation Centre for Official Government Publications (KOOP) is the responsible agency for this project; its goal is to that make government information available, findable and understandable online. KOOP is part of a bigger organisation, Logius that provides and develops digital services in the Netherlands (such as DigiD, of which the source code was also released and DigiPoort).
Cross-level legislation database
The LiDO is a database of the hyperlinks between Dutch and EU legislation that includes national court, the Court of Justice of the EU and the European Court of Human Rights judgements, treaties, laws, regulations, directives and all official documents. It applies the linked data technology, offering a fast access to get insights about the linkages between the regulations at the national and European levels. The LiDO is able to recognise a wide range of citations and most of the search methods commonly used by the lawyers.
Source code available
The tool operates thanks to the LinkeXtractor – a open source reference parser – that creates majority of the LiDO links and which is now going through a revamping process. Following the Digitalisation Work Agenda, the source code of LiDO is now fully accessible online. The developers of the framework have noted that more technical work and redesign is planned for the future, but you can already check out the code base in its repository here.
The source of the picture is Unsplash.com.