Diversification of Legislation Editing Open Software (LEOS) Using Software Agents—Transforming Parliamentary Control of the Hellenic Parliament into Big Open Legal Data

Abstract

The accessibility and reuse of legal data is paramount for promoting transparency, accountability and, ultimately, trust towards governance institutions. The aggregation of structured and semi-structured legal data inevitably leads to the big data realm and a series of challenges for the generation, handling, and analysis of large datasets. When it comes to data generation, LEOS represents a legal informatics tool that is maturing quickly. Now in its third release, it effectively supports the drafting of legal documents using Akoma Ntoso compatible schemes. However, the tool, originally developed for cooperative legislative drafting, can be repurposed to draft parliamentary control documents. This is achieved through the use of actor-oriented software components, referred to as software agents, which enable system interoperability by interlinking the text editing system with parliamentary control datasets. A validated corpus of written questions from the Hellenic Parliament is used to evaluate the feasibility of the endeavour, and the feasibility of using it as an authoring tool for written parliamentary questions and generation of standardised, open, legislative data. Systemic integration not only proves the tool’s versatility, but also opens up new grounds in interoperability between formerly unrelated legal systems and data sources.