The design of PoliDocs: a web information system for the disclosure of Dutch parliamentary publications

The development of PoliDocs.nl, a Web Information System for the disclosure of Dutch parliamentary publications, is an effort to improve the disclosure of parliamentary publications in The Netherlands. The data is distributed over three sources and is available through different Web Information Systems that need improvement. This paper explains how we translated our knowledge about the current situation, about the requirements put forth by the collective weblog Sargasso, and about the wishes and needs of prospective users/professionals into a functional design. The functional design describes the back-end, which relies heavily on the Extract-Transfer-Load (ETL) process to harvest, integrate, transform and store the data. The functional design also describes the front-end website, which uses state-of-the-art techniques to meet the requirements. The functional design meets all the Sargasso requirements except one for which the information is not available.