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Axiom Foundation launches to publish law as open, verifiable code
2 months ago
- Open, machine-readableencodings of laws, starting with tax and benefit policy, are cited, time-aware, and executable for anyone to run, audit, or reform.
- Current systems reimplement law from scratch, differently and opaquely, leading to no shared canonical source and difficulty in verification.
- The Axiom Foundation publishes a shared layer of statute-by-statute rules as code, openly and freely, creating one source of truth.
- Two open layers exist: primary text (gathered from official sources) and encoded rules (with citations, effective dates, composability, and verification).
- An AI-driven pipeline encodes statutes, logs decisions, and cross-checks results against independent engines like PolicyEngine and TAXSIM.
- The encoded law serves as ground truth for AI, enables calculators that self-audit, reform without rewriting, and government transparency.
- Everything published—code, data, and decisions—is open, ensuring public-interest work.
Welkom bij OpenTK (deel 1) - Bert Hubert's writings
2 months ago
- OpenTK is an open source project that uses the Tweede Kamer API to provide better insight into parliamentary activities.
- Goals include real-time visibility, early involvement in topics, findable documents with context, and a basis for data-driven research.
- The site offers higher information density than the official site, with documents appearing hours earlier.
- Documents are organized into 'Zaken' (cases) and 'Kamerstukdossiers' (dossiers) for comprehensive tracking.
- The search engine supports wildcards, exact phrases, NOT, NEAR, and filters for document type and time range.
- Activities include planned meetings and unplanned items that may be discussed later, useful for early influence.
- Decisions and votes are tracked, with context provided to avoid misinterpretation.
- Parliamentary questions and ministerial commitments are tracked, with many open items.
- Member pages show their activities, speeches, documents, and gifts.
- Live reports (verslagen) appear during meetings, uncorrected, and later become official documents.
- Part 2 will cover monitors and alerts; the project is open source and welcomes contributions.
Welkom bij OpenTK (deel 2): de monitors - Bert Hubert's writings
2 months ago
- OpenTK is an open-source project that visualizes Dutch parliamentary data via a technical API provided by the Tweede Kamer, making parliamentary processes transparent.
- Users can create a minimal account using only an email address to set up monitors that send email alerts within a minute when new documents match specific criteria.
- Monitors can be placed on various parliamentary elements including committees, persons, document dossiers, search queries, cases, and activities.
- Multiple monitors matching the same document result in a single email, preventing duplicate alerts.
- Tips for effective monitoring include adding monitors on relevant committees, active members, specific dossiers, tailored search queries, and upcoming activities or meetings.
- Users can manage and view all monitors on their personal page, check match counts, and delete monitors as needed.
- Recent updates include improvements to document dossiers and alerts for answers to parliamentary questions.
- Feedback and suggestions for improving the monitor feature are welcome via email.
The World's 2,400 Castles
2 months ago
- Castlemap is a free interactive map of 2,435 castles, fortresses, and palaces across 129 countries.
- The map is built entirely from open data: Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons, Wikipedia, OpenFreeMap, and Natural Earth.
- It curates only verified landmarks with real photos, English Wikipedia articles, and exact coordinates, balancing countries for explorability.
- Users can add missing castles by improving their Wikidata entries (coordinates, photo, English article) for the next refresh.
- The full dataset is free to download as GeoJSON or CSV under CC0.
- France has the most castles (183), followed by Italy, Germany, England, and Japan.
- Each castle has a 'fame score' based on Wikipedia language editions; Versailles ranks #1.
- The atlas is curated, not exhaustive, focusing on significance over quantity.
Common Crawl
3 months ago
- Common Crawl offers a free and open repository of web crawl data.
- It is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization established in 2007.
- It facilitates wholesale extraction, transformation, and analysis of open web data for researchers.

open data

Axiom Foundation launches to publish law as open, verifiable code

Welkom bij OpenTK (deel 1) - Bert Hubert's writings

Welkom bij OpenTK (deel 2): de monitors - Bert Hubert's writings

The World's 2,400 Castles

Common Crawl