Memorandum by the Parliamentary Information
and Communications Technology Department (PICT)
INTRODUCTION
1. PICT is the Joint Department of Parliament
which supports the work of Members and of the administrations
of both Houses with ICT services. As such it has no direct responsibility
for the content of on-line or other information services, nor
for outreach and consultation activities, but the work of PICT
has an impact on the ability of systems to provide data for public
consumption in a timely and usable way.
2. We note that witnesses heard by the Committee
have raised issues about the ease of movement from one data-set
to another on the public website, for example, from a Member's
name appearing in the context of a debate to that Member's committee
contributions, or voting record. Several witnesses also made the
case for data to be presented on the website in accordance with
"open standards" which allow the maximum possible re-use
and analysis of the data to meet the needs of the user.
PARLIAMENTARY DATA
SYSTEMS
3. Almost all the Parliamentary processes
which produce data of public interest have been automated over
the past 10-15 years and in almost every case information is now
held within Parliamentary systems in digital form. In some cases
data are associated with the use of xml (the principal international
standard for metadata—see below paragraph 6), but this is
mainly to hold information about the correct formatting of documents
to be printed from the data and therefore does not support reuse
in other formats. Development has been piecemeal, using a wide
range of different tools, technologies and standards in 28 more
or less separate systems. These factors limit the usefulness of
the outputs in the ways that witnesses to the committee have identified.
4. While much work has been done to improve and
add value to the public website, this has been constrained by
the nature of the underlying systems.
THE CASE
FOR OPEN
STANDARDS
5. The case for moving to open standards
for Parliamentary data and documents is well established and has
recently been endorsed by World e-Parliament Conferences which
were held in 2007 and 2008 and attended by delegates from the
British Parliament, including the committee's chairman. As the
World e-Parliament Report 2008 explains:
The use of open standards is valuable because
it extends the accessibility of legislative documents, not only
within the parliament, but between the legislature and the government,
between parliaments and the civil society, and among parliaments
internationally.[27]
6. XML is (eXtensible Markup Language) is,
strictly speaking, not a language itself but a set of standard
grammatical rules to which a software programming language has
to comply in order to be regarded as well-formed and valid in
the way it embeds metadata (information about information—sometimes
described as tags or labels). XML has been recognised as a standard
by the World Wide Web Consortium since 1998. It has been applied
and extended into numerous specialist tools over the past decade,
but underlying them all is an international non-proprietary standard
which has retained its integrity.
7. The other key principle is that content
should not be dependent on a fixed publication format. Preferred
retrieval format depends on whether the output is printed paper,
personal computer or mobile device. It also depends on our reason
for wishing to find and read information. For example, we may
wish to see a particular Parliamentary question and answer in
the context of the proceedings taking place on a particular day
in the Chamber, or in the context of the information available
on a particular subject, or in the context of the activity of
a particular parliamentarian and minister, or as part of a searchable
database of all the questions asked in a particular session.
8. Two successful projects carried out by
PICT have demonstrated the value of the new approach: a new xml
authoring tool for the Votes and Proceedings documents in the
House of Commons has been producing data conforming to open standards
since December 2008; in addition we have an experimental project
based on open source software and open standards for the historical
archive of Hansard material from both Houses. In this case the
data is derived partly from optical scanning and digitising of
Hansard volumes back to 1803, and, for more recent data, on the
published electronic data set.[28]
The experimental site is heavily used and has been well received.
9. Several recent developments should support
the further evolution of British Parliamentary data systems towards
open standards.
FURTHER PROGRESS
TOWARDS OPEN
STANDARDS
10. Firstly, PICT has commissioned technical
advice from recognised experts in this field on the principles
and standards which should underlie the next generation of Parliamentary
systems, as and when current systems become obsolescent or need
to be upgraded. Since many of the existing systems, including
the Hansard Reporting Suite used in both Houses, are at or approaching
this stage, it is important that these decisions should be made
without delay.
11. Secondly, senior officials in both Houses
have agreed in principle that the next stage of development of
Parliamentary systems creating, holding or publishing data about
the core work of the two Houses should be taken forward by PICT
under a single programme board for both Houses in order to ensure
consistency and an overview of the information outputs required
internally for the efficient working of Members and officials,
and externally for members of the public.
12. Thirdly, PICT has been active in understanding
and learning from the experience of other Parliaments. In particular,
the Canadian House of Commons, which has developed a highly successful
xml-based systems architecture for all internal information-processing,
publication and broadcasting, provides a helpful model for some
aspects of what we hope to achieve at Westminster in the years
to come.
May 2009
27 See Documenting the Legislative Process (Chapter
V) in World e-Parliament Report 2008, Global Centre for ICT in
Parliament, 2008, p 73 Available at: http://www.ictparliament.org/index.php?option=com
contact&task=view&contact id=3&Itemid=1086 Back
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http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/ Back
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