Swedish Riksdag 1867–2022: An Ecosystem of Linked Open Data

The bulk of all Swedish parliamentary documents – debates, bills, motions, and committee reports – have been digitized during the last decade. This material constitutes a rich source to study Swedish legislation, political culture, and democratic development.

However, the lack of thorough metadata structure and linked parliamentary data, and the patchwork of gaps and digitization errors, have generated a somewhat primitive research infrastructure.

Together with the Riksdag Library, the purpose of SWERIK is to address these limitations by constructing a research corpus with an ecosystem of linked open data of the bicameral and unicameral Riksdag, from 1867 to today. The project contains five work packages (WP1–5). WP1 will annotate people and content in parliamentary documents.

WP2 will build a database of metadata for all members of parliament (MP). WP3 will create a linked infrastructure where MPs in the database are connected to related parliamentary documents.

WP4 will align the annotated corpus with ParlaMint – an international infrastructure for marking up parliamentary data, which enables researchers to compare national parliaments.

Finally, WP5 will integrate the SWERIK corpus with the Riksdag user interface and facilitate the usability of the corpus for different users both within and outside academia.

The SWERIK corpus will be given a free CC BY-license, and the Riksdag Library will be responsible for storing and maintaining the corpus after the project has ended.