Document describing the procedure and criteria to access to the vote roll-calls in machine-redable format xml from ACTES
Dear European Parliament,
Under the right of access to documents in the EU treaties, as developed in Regulation 1049/2001, I am requesting documents which contain the following information:
The document describing the procedures and criteria to access to the vote roll-calls in machine-redable format xml from ACTES. Can you as well provide the licencing agreement defining how these documents can de used or re-distributed or is this a standard opendata one?
I have been made aware that at least two private organisations (zdf and votewatch) that benefit from privilegiated access to xml documents of the roll-calls send to them by email. I am requesting you the documents supporting the European Parliament reason not to provide that directly on europarl website.
Yours faithfully,
xavier dutoit
Ref : A(2014)1112
Dear Mr Lentfer,
We acknowledge receipt of your request. You will receive a reply within
15 working days
Transparency - Public Access to documents Unit
Directorate B - DG EPRS
European Parliament
Dear Liechtenstein parliament,
I'm sure you will take great care finding me the document I've requested, but just to clarify, you probably send your acknowledgement to the wrong request.
Could you confirm you received my case and it's only a confusion between the names?
Yours sincerely,
xavier dutoit (aka "Mr Lentfer" in some circles it seems ;)
Dear Mr Dutoit,
We confirm that your request has indeed been received and we are sorry
for the confusion between the names.
With kind regards,
Transparency - Public Access to documents Unit
Directorate B - DG EPRS
European Parliament
Dear Sir,
Roll-call votes are available in a machine-readable format (xml and html)
on the European Parliament website, on its public register of documents.
They are annexed to the Minutes of the plenary sessions and are published
the day after the session.
See for instance :
[1]http://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/se...
No specific document exists describing access procedures, as these are
standard open data formats.
As for "privileged access", please note that Parliament will provide an
excel table on demand, to any citizen requesting it.
Kind regards,
Transparency - Public Access to documents Unit
[2]cid:398064113@29012014-0A07 Directorate B - DG
Parliamentary Research
Services
European Parliament
[3]Public Register
webpage
From: xavier dutoit [mailto:[FOI #1156 email]]
Sent: 26 January 2014 12:29
To: Registre
Subject: [SPAM SUSPECTED] access to information request - Document
describing the procedure and criteria to access to the vote roll-calls in
machine-redable format xml from ACTES
Dear European Parliament,
Under the right of access to documents in the EU treaties, as developed in
Regulation 1049/2001, I am requesting documents which contain the
following information:
The document describing the procedures and criteria to access to the vote
roll-calls in machine-redable format xml from ACTES. Can you as well
provide the licencing agreement defining how these documents can de used
or re-distributed or is this a standard opendata one?
I have been made aware that at least two private organisations (zdf and
votewatch) that benefit from privilegiated access to xml documents of the
roll-calls send to them by email. I am requesting you the documents
supporting the European Parliament reason not to provide that directly on
europarl website.
Yours faithfully,
xavier dutoit
-------------------------------------------------------------------
This is a request for access to information under Article 15 of the TFEU
and, where applicable, Regulation 1049/2001 which has been sent via the
AsktheEU.org website.
Please kindly use this email address for all replies to this request:
[4][FOI #1156 email]
If [5][email address] is the wrong address for information
requests to European Parliament, please tell the AsktheEU.org team on
email [6][email address]
This message and all replies from European Parliament will be published on
the AsktheEU.org website. For more information see our dedicated page for
EU public officials at [7]http://www.asktheeu.org/en/help/officers
-------------------------------------------------------------------
References
Visible links
1. http://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/se...
3. http://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegWeb/app...
4. mailto:[FOI #1156 email]
5. mailto:[email address]
6. mailto:[AsktheEU.org contact email]
7. http://www.asktheeu.org/en/help/officers
Dear Registre,
Thank for for the example link you gave
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/se...
How can I find it for other votes? I have been trying to see a similar link based on the normal access to the site.
For instance from the minutes of thu
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getD...
And I see the rollcall, but it isn't in a machine readable format (only pdf and doc).
Yours sincerely,
xavier dutoit
Dear Sir,
Please note that you can find the votes in machine-readable format in the
EP Public register of documents:
[1]http://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegistreWe...
You should choose the tab "By document type":
1. Documents relating to parliamentary activity
1.2 Plenary documents
1.2.4 Minutes
1.2.4.2 Finalised minutes
There you will find the RCV in xml and htlm format (from June 2003
onwards).
As for the current plenary sitting, the results were sent to the Register
on 05/02 so they should be available on 06/02 (replication takes place
overnight).
Feel free to contact us should you need further information / help
([2][email address])
Kind regards
Transparency - Public Access to documents Unit
[3]cid:398064113@29012014-0A07 Directorate B - DG
Parliamentary Research
Services
European Parliament
[4]Public Register
webpage
Dear Registre,
The roll calls still aren't published.
Joachim analysed how many of these roll calls are published:
351 of the unique files are /RCV.*xml/ - that's the XML that documents the roll-call votes.
Split by years:
2003 (06-12): 23 files
2004: 32 files
2005: 33 files
2006: 38 files
2007: 40 files
2008: 37 files
2009: 40 files
2010: 32 files
2011: 39 files
2012: 31 files
2013: 6 files
2014: 0 files
So since the start of 2013, only 6 roll calls have been published.
However, they have been 36 days with votes in plenary in 2013 and 5 in 2014.
Transparency is about publishing all the documents in a timely fashion and in a computer readable format.
How is that you are not publishing the majority of the roll calls in an xml format?
And to come back to my initial question: some organisations receive in a timely fashion 100% of these roll calls whilst you are hiding the majority of them for the general public.
Is there a document describing the procedure and criteria to get access to 100% of the roll calls in a timely fashion? Is this only available to companies and not all citizen?
Yours sincerely,
xavier dutoit
For your information: you have 78 documents that are listed (out of 4263 links) but not available (404). Is this normal?
A 1143/MDV/en/clarifications
Dear Sir,
On a general note, the e-Parliament program focuses on the optimization of
parliamentary text production internal processes, by shifting from a from
an unstructured document- based production to a structured XML content
approach; the publication of such XML content does not fall under the
scope of the e-Parliament program.
The multilingual AM documents contain amendments in many languages and are
not currently published as such. Their monolingual version however is
published after translation on Europarl and Register. For the time being,
there is no plan to change this. The use of Akoma Ntoso for the production
of the multilingual amendment documents (AM documents) at Committee level
aims to streamline internal processes (thanks to the advantages of a
structured content approach) and does not target the publication of the AM
documents.
We will use XML to optimize internal amendment production processes,
however the publication of the XML version is not planned at this stage.
Kind regards
Transparency - Public Access to documents Unit
[1]cid:398064113@29012014-0A07 Directorate B - DG
Parliamentary Research
Services
European Parliament
[2]Public Register
webpage
References
Visible links
2. http://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegWeb/app...
Dear Registre,
Thanks for that general note, I am pleased that you use an open standard approach to optimise your internal process and it's a great step in the right direction.
However and to increase your transparency, it would encourage you to go a step further and publish these to make them available to everyone, as you already do for most using a hard to process automatically format (eg. pdf or word).
This is an open letter to Mr. Welle on that topic
http://europarl.me/open%20letter%20for%2...
However, my question is specifically about the xml roll-calls. You have published about 15% only of them in the past two years on your website.
I would like to know why it's only partially available to everyone, and what are the criteria to be able to receive all of them in a timely manner, as some private organisations do receive them from the EP.
Looking forward for your answer,
xavier dutoit
Dear Sir,
Roll-call-votes (RCV) are published in a timely fashion, the morning after
the plenary session, on europarl, in a pdf format. They are thus
accessible to citizens as required by Regulation (EC) n°1049/2001.
As far as format is concerned, the European Parliament is particularly
interested in openness and in meeting citizen expectations, which evolve
over time. Therefore the EP is currently developing the IT tools necessary
to publish xml data whenever possible.
Concerning RCV, there has been a backlog for publishing the xml format due
to technical issues in the IT workflow (between the creation of the
document and its publication on the Internet). We are currently working to
solve this problem and thanks to your alerts we have now made sure that
most of the RCV are available in xml format.
[1]http://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegistreWe...
Please note that no document exists describing the procedure and criteria
to get access to 100% RCV, as they are available online the day after the
plenary in a pdf format.
As for access to a machine readable format of RCV, the only criteria is to
send a written request to Parliament's Plenary Services or to EP Register.
For example, the most recent request was received from a student in
November 2013 asking for the RCV of the 7^th Parliamentary legislature. He
received the document requested within 15 working days, as required by
Regulation (EC) n°1049/2001.
We would like to ask for clarification as to your statement " For your
information: you have 78 documents that are listed (out of 4263 links) but
not available (404). Is this normal?" Could you please specify to which
documents you refer.
Thank you for your interest and keeping us alerted to errors contained in
the Register.
Kind regards
Transparency - Public Access to documents Unit
[2]cid:398064113@29012014-0A07 Directorate B - DG
Parliamentary Research
Services
European Parliament
[3]Public Register
webpage
References
Visible links
1. http://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegistreWe...
3. http://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegWeb/app...
Dear Registre,
I'm glad to hear that you are working on publishing the rollcalls of 2013 and 2014 backlog.
I believe the colleague that did the analysis posted a comment with the link to the list of other errors found in the registry.
There is still something I don't understand in your answer: you are telling me they aren't any document or process to receive in a timely fashion xml format, but I know for a fact that some organisations receive it, at least as fast as the pdf is published.
Is there some discrimination at play here?
Yours sincerely,
xavier dutoit
Dear Mr Dutoit
Please note that the European Parliament deals with all requests it
receives without any discrimination.
Therefore if you are interested in receiving the xml format directly,
please feel free to contact DG COMM (Mr Jaume DUCH) to make such a
request.
Kind regards
┌─────────────────────┬──────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│[1]EPRS_LOGO_150x75 │TRANSPARENCY ACCESS TO DOCUMENTS │
│ │European Parliament │
│ │European Parliamentary Research Service │
│ │Directorate for the Library │
├─────────────────────┴──────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ │
├─────────────────────┬──────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ [2]LOGOPE │[3]Public Register webpage │
│ │ │
│ │* [4][email address] │
└─────────────────────┴──────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
[5]WordPress [6]Facebook [7]Twitter
Joachim Gola dejó un comentario ()
For the question about "missing files", see the full list as of March 27th, 2014 here: https://gist.github.com/igorette/9809087
joachim gola