Draft:OParl

  • Comment: We need to see substantial secondary coverage of the subject to demonstrate notability. There's none here. Sulfurboy (talk) 20:50, 5 August 2026 (UTC)

OParl is an open standard that defines a machine-readable interface to the council information systems (German: Ratsinformationssysteme) used by municipalities in Germany. It specifies a read-only REST API returning JSON-LD, allowing software to retrieve meetings, agenda items, motions, resolutions, documents and elected representatives from participating municipalities in a uniform way.[1] The standard is published under a Creative Commons license (CC BY 3.0 DE) and can be used free of charge.

Background

Most German municipalities, districts and regions operate a council information system to organise the work of the municipal council, its committees and district assemblies. These systems document local political initiatives from the initial enquiry to the final resolution, and in many places large parts of the data are publicly accessible.[2] Because each vendor implemented its own web interface, the information could be read by citizens but not easily processed by software or compared across municipalities.

History

Work on the standard began in 2012 as an initiative of the Open Knowledge Foundation Deutschland together with the German Association of Cities (Deutscher Städtetag) and the principal vendors of council information systems.[3] A workshop on open council information systems held in Cologne in 2013, attended by municipal representatives, software vendors and researchers, produced the name OParl. An open call for contributions to the specification followed in 2014.[4]

Version 1.0 of the specification was published in July 2016,[5] followed by version 1.1 in 2018, which remains current. The specification is maintained in a public repository.[6]

Technical design

OParl is specified as a REST API that returns JSON following JSON-LD principles, so that objects carry globally unique identifiers and can be linked semantically.[1] A conforming interface exposes a fixed set of object types, among them System, Body, Organization, Person, Membership, Meeting, AgendaItem, Consultation, Paper, File, LegislativeTerm and Location. Access is anonymous and read-only, and implementations support incremental retrieval of objects modified since a given date.

Because the interface exposes personal data such as the names of elected representatives, the specification advises municipalities to review which fields they publish — for example e-mail addresses, postal addresses, photographs and attendance lists — and to consult their data protection officer beforehand.[1]

Adoption

The interface is generally offered as an optional module of an existing council information system, which means availability depends on whether an individual municipality has enabled it rather than on the software in use.[2] Implementations exist for the systems of the major German vendors, and the standard is in productive use in municipalities across the country.

The European Union's open data portal lists OParl as a use case for opening up public sector information, describing it as beneficial to citizens, municipalities, developers and vendors of council information systems.[7]

The Open Knowledge Foundation Deutschland cites projects such as Politik bei Uns, Frankfurt Gestalten and Abgeordnetenwatch as examples of the growing interest in reusing council information.[3] Non-commercial portals have since used the interface to aggregate council information from many municipalities into a single searchable collection, among them Ratsblick.[8]

References

  1. ^ a b c "OParl-Spezifikation" (in German). OParl. Retrieved 2026-08-05.
  2. ^ a b "Über OParl" (in German). OParl. Retrieved 2026-08-05.
  3. ^ a b "OParl". Open Knowledge Foundation Deutschland. Retrieved 2026-08-05.
  4. ^ "OParl project for Linked Parliamentary Data". World Wide Web Consortium Open Government Community Group. 2014-01-29. Retrieved 2026-08-05.
  5. ^ "Open-Data-Schnittstelle Oparl 1.0 macht Kommunen transparenter". Linux-Magazin (in German). 2016-07-12. Retrieved 2026-08-05.
  6. ^ "OParl/spec". GitHub. Retrieved 2026-08-05.
  7. ^ "OParl". data.europa.eu. Retrieved 2026-08-05.
  8. ^ "Quellen und Datenherkunft". Ratsblick (in German). Retrieved 2026-08-05.


Category:Open data Category:Application programming interfaces Category:Local government in Germany Category:Technical specifications

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