Legislative documents - extending usage

[Ashok Hariharan <ashok@parliaments.info>]

Akoma Ntoso until now is a model for representing existing "paper/print" documents. E.g. Bill, Judgement, Acts etc.

However - there is a lot of information recorded in Legislatures (and I would think the case extends even to the judiciary ) - which does not fall into the category of "formal print" documents modeled by Akoma Ntoso, so I want to call them "virtual documents" since they are not "formal" documents (and may not have a formal form - in fact they will in many cases have a virtual form - in some kind of computer system ) 

For instance - there is information about a tenure of parliament itself in terms of when it began and when it ended, what its composition was, and what its extended metadata was (the parliament was called "6th parliament"). The same applies to the committees, and if you ultimately describe the metadata in granular detail - you would want to describe information about people - e.g. the metadata concerning a member of parliament. 

This information is important because it gets referenced from Akoma Ntoso documents. A typical use case  is in a debate-record (hansard ) - the debate-record has the spoken words of different members of parliament ; If the member name was marked up correctly it allows you to pull out all speeches made by the member of parliament in that tenure of parliament -- However it doesnt give you any info about the particular Member of Parliament nor about that particular tenure of parliament. 

Similarly if you had bills in Akoma Ntoso, and you had a bill tracking app built on top of that. Currently the information provided by the Akoma Ntoso document is just that the bill is in a committee on X date, its not possible to get information about the committee itself (or its composition which may be very relevant information ) .

What I am suggesting is that there may be some benefit in being to able to model non-document entities in Akoma Ntoso. I know now this can be done via proprietary metadata or modelling this extend metadata in RDF documents - but thats everyone unto his/herself. At least for legislative entities the entity model is essentially - groups having members and both groups and members having descriptive metadata.