Using semantic annotations on political debate videos for building open government based lawmaking

The traditional concept and practice of lawmaking is being transformed by the open government paradigm. It involves a new digital model that links three principles: transparency, participation and collaboration. However, the information system‐enabled solutions in this context are still in their infancy, which none available that address the three crucial challenges: (1) providing the functionalities for semantic search and retrieval of video clips on political debates about legislative proposals, (2) support of open participation and collaboration with contextual information in lawmaking processes and, (3) automatic generation of outcomes achieved in the lawmaking lifecycle. In this article, we describe the underlying methods and techniques leading to address these challenges when a semantic‐driven approach is applied for the development and validation of the real‐world scenario of open government‐based lawmaking systems. To evaluate the value created by using a semantic‐driven approach as computational backbone, the development and testing of a software platform as case study was carried out together with experts from a parliamentary institution and analysed the user experience in parliamentary settings with end‐users. The results show how the use of the appropriate techniques for the adoption of a semantic assumption is a key enabler for the management and retrieval of information tasks relating to the lawmaking lifecycle providing a transparent, participatory and collaborative approach in a holistic way.