Notes from the workshop.

• Event page: http://ogd-bg.eventbrite.com/
• Original material: http://okfnpad.org/workshop-sofia-20110604
• Have now migrated all the data mapping information to: http://wiki.ckan.net/Bulgaria – please contribute there!

Initial Agenda

1. Introductions
2. Set agenda and outline for the day

People

• Martin – software engineer. Interested in design and how government works.
• Chrastian – ontotext. Interested in open semantic data. http://www.ontotext.com/
• Elena – from Sofia University (teach Sociology). Teach course on content analysis. Excited that there is growing interested in public data. You can process a lot but need a purpose.
• Martin – OpenStreetMap’er. How can we integrate with other data e.g. missing people
• Ivo – works for ontotext
• Galia – just interested in open data
• Bogdаn – software author. Curiosity!
• Peio – legal adviser by day, IT background. Curious.
• Plamen – ex-software engineer. Aggregating data from bulgarian parliament.
• Alex – interested in using new technologies, electronics and music!
• Stoian Mishinev – IT Specialist
• Yana Petrova – journalism student

Agenda

1. Data (and problem) mapping
2. Problems with getting data
3. Tools for working with data and developing a community around it (using it)

Summary

Gov data mapping

• Legislation
• Finances
• Civic info
• Transport
• Geodata
• News / Gazettes

Government structure in Bulgaria

• Central Gov – executive and parliament and courts
• Regions (28)
• Municipalities (cities are sometimes municipalities by themselves)
• Districts (possibly)
• (mayors in smallest villages)

Legal status for gov material (e.g. legilslation) — ЗАПСП http://lex.bg/bg/laws/ldoc/2133094401 Член 4, точка 4 Не са обект на авторско право

• Не са обект на авторското право:

  1. нормативни и индивидуални актове на държавни органи за управление, …
  2. новини, факти, сведения и данни.

Question: how far does this extend to all documents.

The Law

The law: in state gazette: mostly online (html and pdf)? http://dv.parliament.bg

• last issue on the front page
• Download link but note javascript! http://dv.parliament.bg/DVWeb/index.faces#
• Old issues (note no change in link – js strikes again!): http://dv.parliament.bg/DVWeb/index.faces
• Oldest gazette is 2004
• Before that => public library
• private db: http://lex.bg/

Public procurement

4th tab link on: http://dv.parliament.bg/ (no direct link because no urls!)

Parliamentary

• http://www.parliament.bg/
• Members: http://www.parliament.bg/bg/MP
  • Original data for MP’s: http://parliament.bg/export.php/bg/xml/MP/1 , 2 .. etc
• Extracted data: http://ckan.net/package/open-data-of-the-bulgarian-parliament
  • Draft legislation: http://www.parliament.bg/bg/bills
  • No voting info in committees or plenary

Committee debates: http://www.parliament.bg/bg/parliamentarycommittees/members/226/steno

• Example: http://www.parliament.bg/bg/parliamentarycommittees/members/226/steno/ID/1509
• Unstructured HTML

Plenary sessions debates: http://www.parliament.bg/bg/plenaryst

Legal decisions

• Constitutional court: http://www.constcourt.bg/Pages/eFolders/Default.aspx
• Supreme administrative court decisions: http://www.sac.government.bg/WEBDIS.nsf/vPagesLookup/home~bg

Local stuff

• List of all courts: http://www.justice.bg/bg/vlast/1.htm
• Sofia website: http://sofia.bg/
  • http://www.sofia.bg/en/index_en.asp
• Planning decisions: not available online it appears
• Sofia-council-sessions-archive: http://www.request.bg/index.php/lang-bg/sofia-council-sessions-archive
• The Stakeholder Engagement Plan: http://www.sofia.bg/pictss/ei/SOFIA%20IUTP%20SEP%20-%20Final%20-%202011-04-20%20BG.pdf

Finances

Have CKAN package: http://ckan.net/package/bg-budget

• State gazette (contains all the Budget Acts): http://dv.parliament.bg
• Sofia budget http://www.sofia.bg/budget.asp>

Transport

• Trains: Publicly owned
  • Timetable and routes: http://bdz.bg/
  • On time statistics: …
• Trams in sofia: Publicly owned
• Bus: part private / part public http://www.sofiatraffic.bg/
  • timetable: http://www.sofiatraffic.bg/bg/transport/schedules/
• Subway: publicly owned

Civic Info (Health, Education etc)

• Health outcomes – e.g. mortality?
  • National statistical institute – http://www.nsi.bg
• Nurseries: …
  • Sofia nurseries: http://kg.sofia.bg/
  • Informal: http://www.bg-mamma.com/
• Schools
  • Exam results per school http://www.matura.bg/html_includes/765/765.pdf
  • List of all schools: http://www.minedu.government.bg/left_menu/registers/ (pdf)
• Crime data: http://www.nsi.bg/otrasal.php?otr=25&a1=839&a2=883&a3=929

Company Register

The company register was publicly available until 2011; at some point in 2011 it has been closed and access to it is available for a fee.

• http://brra.bg/
  • Charge for data ~ €15000 – see http://brra.bg/ContentManagement.ra?contentType=6
  • Can download one record at a time via captcha
  • Not sure of legal status

[ACTION: Peio - get old dump and analysis and add to relevant CKAN dataset]

Geodata and Cadastral

• Land registry and mapping agency: http://www.cadastre.bg/
  • No data available as far as one can tell!
• Postcodes: …

Problems getting data

• Gov objections to giving out data (and what can you do about it).
• Data format
• Data persistence
• Data quality

ACTION [Peio]: clarify scope of public domain provision for gov data (is this just legislation and gov documents or all gov data)

What do we do about PDF? * Ask – directly or via http://isitopendata.org/ * Find a contact if you can * Find out what the worries are … * Transcribe * Find tools – http://getthedata.org/questions/339/excel-table-from-a-pdf

[ACTION: Rufus Pollock: ask Julian Todd to write up instructions on PDF parsing based on UNDemocracy experience]

Tools and Communities

Basic process:

1. Extract
2. Transform (clean and integrate)
3. Load

Tools:

• A programming language (e.g. javascript, python)
• Scraperwiki
• http://CKAN.net/
• Viz: http://wiki.okfn.org/OpenVisualisation
  • static: whatever you want
• R / Sagemath (maths end)

Proprietary but free (in some form or other):

• Google docs and google fusion tables
• Google refine
• Tableau, Needlebase …

Ideas / Wanted

• croudsourcing the collection of all the bulgarian legislative data
• extract structured info from plenary and committee debates
• list of municipalities
• http://wiki.openspending.org/Countries – find volunteers to populate data for the Bulgarian budget
• on time stats for public transport
• wifi locations
  • http://vasil.ludost.net/wardriving – two course papers from students in Sofia University, wardriving in a the Student city district.
• ‘Tell me about my area’ — On my phone (on facebook even!)