Linked open data and e-participation in the EU law-making process

Abstract

In this paper a pilot project on Linked Open Data (LOD) and e-Participation, promoted by the European Parliament and developed by the Publications Office of the European Union (OP), is described. By exploiting the LOD service for pre-legislative documents available at OP, the project aims at allowing citizens to actively participate in public consultations within the EU decision-making process. In particular it gives citizens the possibility to participate in the preparation of standard-compliant and process-compatible documents throughout the law-making. In particular they can provide comments and amendments on each document fragment, as well express their sentiments on them. The data produced will be available as LOD; for this reason a specific semantic approach able to describe documents and users activities is implemented.