UNION INTERPARLEMENTAIRE INTER-PARLIAMENTARY UNION

Association of Secretaries General of Parliaments

COMMUNICATION

from

MS. J. BIESHEUVEL-VERMEIJDEN Secretary General of the House of Representatives of the States General of the

Netherlands

and

Mr. P. BRANGER Director of the Information Unit

on

Innovative practices in the Dutch Parliament: a new corrections website and the system for reporting plenary and committee meetings

Geneva SessionMarch 2014

VLOS Highlight Summary

Introduction: VLOS is the Reporting Support System used by the Parliamentary Reporting Office of the House of Representatives and Senate of The Netherlands to prepare the minutes of both Plenary and Committee meetings.

History: The first version of VLOS was brought into use in October 2011. A redesign aimed at upgrading the technology was implemented at a later date. This resulted in the second version, which was released in the House of Representatives on 25 June 2013. Its introduction in the Senate followed on 4 March 2014. In October 2013 the Revision Website was introduced. This website is already being used by the members of the House of Representatives and members of the Cabinet who participate in the debates in this House. Starting from the first half of 2014 this website will also be used by members of the Senate and members of the Cabinet who participate in the debates in that House.

An overview of the features offered by VLOS:

On the following pages, the VLOS workflow will be described in more detail.

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Information flow:

VLOS receives information from various external IT systems. The information fed into VLOS mainly consists of preparatory details relating to meetings, such as the Agenda and Speakers, as well as detailed information of all the scheduled activities such as motions and amendments. The information is uploaded to VLOS in either MS Word or XML.

The key system for the importing of data into the VLOS system is the Parliamentary Information System (PARLIS)

Producing the report

VLOS facilitates the reporting procedures during and after the meeting. Below you will find a short description of the main steps in the reporting process.

LoggingStenographers take five-minute turns during which they mark everything that happens during the meeting. All their markings are stored in a central database and made available immediately after they return to their desk.

Logging screen of a Plenary Debate

Making up the draft reportBased on the markings in the database, the reporter makes up his or her five-minute section of the report. The first step consists in re-arranging the markings, if necessary. Then, on the basis of the dedicated audio file, the spoken words are added to the markings, using MS Word in a protected template. Please note that MS Word is

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only used to insert text, and the text itself is stored not in a document but in a database. The concept component of the report is then revised twice: firstly with an eye to grammatical and other linguistic matters, and secondly with regard to procedural matters. Once finished, the draft report is published as a HTML-document on intranet and the Internet, so that Members and the General public can follow what is being discussed in the plenary meeting.

The average duration from the time of logging to publication is about two hours.

Report preparation screens

Database and XML-codeBy drawing up the report in the way described above, the reporters are in fact filling in a database in which each item has its own specific place. The hierarchy of the database is determined in the first stages of building the VLOS application. To this end, a vast number of plenary meetings were studied by the application developer together with a subject specialist of the Parliamentary Reporting Office. The starting point of this study was the assumption that, although parliamentary meetings may seem to be chaotic sometimes at first glance, there is a strong structure underlying the whole process. In the Dutch Parliament, this structure is anchored within the Rules of Order of the House of Representatives.

Based on this structure, the Report is stored in a database as a collection of Metadata and Content, embedded in XML-code.

XML-structured report

Revision website

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All speakers receive an invitation by email to visit a specially designed revision website, where they can put forward proposals for revision of their spoken text. This email contains a unique URL to open the Revision Website. By clicking on this link, the user is directed automatically to the sections of the website containing their own texts. Each speaker is only allowed to put forward proposals for revision of their own texts. These text blocks are marked yellow. White text blocks containing texts of other participants in the debates are presented as context. The revision process is entirely digital (paperless) and can be carried out on a PC, tablet or smartphone. A special app designed to replace the invitation email for the Revision Website is currently being developed.

Publications

Publication of the minutes of meeting occurs in two stages. During the meeting a growing version of the draft report is published on the intranet site of the House of Representatives and the Internet site of the House, www.tweedekamer.nl.

After the closure of the revision website (24 hrs. – max 72 hrs.) and processing of the proposals for revision, the corrected report is published on the official publishing website, www.overheid.nl.

Based on the VLOS-DML, the report is published on websites in HTML. Its output in the form of either XML, MS Word or PDF. The output is used to add time markings to audio/video, generate subtitles or publish reports as downloadable MS Word/PDF files from websites, or presented as HTML webpages.

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Video-on-demand and VLOSThe VLOS metadata and content of the report are also used to make video-on-demand accessible. For this purpose the rich XML-report is stripped of its content. The metadata are then linked to the video stream, on the basis of time stamps. This makes it possible to search within videos. (see below).

It has been demonstrated in a test setting that, based on the time stamps and by making use of speech recognition techniques, it is also possible to couple the content of the XML-report to the video stream, producing a form of subtitles. In this way on-demand video streams can easily be made accessible to viewers with hearing disorders.

Third-party use

Traditionally the minutes of meetings were presented as printed documents, but the electronic XML file has now replaced the paper document. The XML is converted into a HTML webpage or MS Word/PDF document, the look and feel of which is determined by the style sheet which is used. In fact, the XML can be used by third parties to present a portion of the minutes of a meeting in a wide variety of ways. It is no longer necessary to report per meeting, but instead snapshots can be taken from a range of meetings, to create statistical charts for example.

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VLOS Technology: VLOS was developed using Microsoft technology and specifically the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). Information is stored in a MS SQL Server database cluster. The application is developed using the dot.NET programming language within a MS Sharepoint application framework. Using XML SOAP web services, data is exchanged via a MS BizTalk server. Because of the high performance requirements of the marking module used by the stenographers in the meeting halls, VLOS downloads all the necessary information onto the Marking PCs beforehand. The marking screen is presented within a browser, but in fact it is a XBAP-compiled application that runs locally on the PC and saves information asynchronously onto the server after each five-minute turn. This means that the usual web page delays do not occur.

Technical lay out of the VLOS system:From left to right:

- Revision website;- VLOS core with the individual modules preparing, logging, reporting, publication, revision and final

publication;- CC-Connect, a bizz talk platform which connects several applications- Parlis application for document input- Websites House of Representatives and Senate for draft publications- Missed debate application for video on demand- Offical publications

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