glossAPI/opengov-deliberations-v2

OpenGov Greek Public Deliberations v2

Dataset Info

This dataset is a structured snapshot of the Greek government's public e-consultation platform OpenGov.gr - the official portal where Greek ministries publish draft legislation and policy initiatives for article-by-article public commentary before they are tabled in the Hellenic Parliament. Each consultation typically covers a single bill or policy proposal and is opened for a fixed window during which citizens, civil-society organizations, professional bodies, and other stakeholders submit substantive comments.

The dataset is the second iteration (v2) of an earlier glossAPI release of the same source. Compared to the previous version, v2 introduces a normalized nested schema (consultation → articles → comments), drops a large number of empty/redundant scraping-pipeline fields, parses date strings to native timestamps, and replaces the raw HTML article bodies with cleaned plain text (body_text).

The corpus contains 1,168 consultations spanning 2009–2026, hosted by 36 different Greek ministries, including their full set of 30,505 legislative articles, 348,380 citizen comments, and 2,286 supporting documents (impact analyses, reports, accompanying drafts). The data was scraped from opengov.gr between 2026-04-06 and 2026-04-08.

The structure preserves the document hierarchy of an actual consultation:

• A consultation corresponds to a single piece of draft legislation or policy proposal posted by a ministry.
• Each consultation contains an ordered list of articles (άρθρα) of the draft.
• Each article contains an ordered list of comments submitted by citizens or organizations on that specific article.
• Each consultation can also contain associated documents (e.g. impact assessments, accompanying analyses, deliberation reports).

This shape makes the dataset suitable for both consultation-level analysis (legislative scope, ministry coverage, comment volume) and fine-grained NLP research over the actual textual content of the laws and the public reactions they elicited.

Metadata Info

The parquet has one row per consultation. The full schema, including nested lists, is:

Path	Type	Description
consultation_id	int64	Internal numeric primary key for the consultation.
post_id	string	WordPress post id assigned by opengov.gr.
url	string	Canonical URL of the consultation on opengov.gr.
title	string	Title of the consultation (typically the title of the draft law / policy initiative).
start_minister_message	string	Opening message of the responsible minister introducing the consultation.
end_minister_message	string	Closing message of the minister published after the consultation period (may be empty).
start_date	timestamp[us]	Date/time the consultation was opened to the public.
end_date	timestamp[us]	Date/time the consultation was closed.
scraped_at	timestamp[us]	Date/time this consultation was fetched from opengov.gr (per-row scrape provenance).
ministry	struct	Information about the originating ministry.
ministry.ministry_id	int64	Internal numeric id of the ministry.
ministry.code	string	Short code used in opengov.gr URLs (e.g. minenv, minfin).
ministry.name	string	Official name of the ministry in Greek.
ministry.url	string	URL of the ministry's section on opengov.gr.
articles	list	Ordered list of legislative articles included in the draft under consultation.
articles[].article_id	int64	Internal id of the article.
articles[].title	string	Article heading as published.
articles[].url	string	Canonical URL of the article on opengov.gr.
articles[].body_text	string	Plain-text body of the article (extracted from the original HTML, NFC-normalized).
articles[].comments	list	Ordered list of citizen / organization comments on this specific article.
articles[].comments[].comment_row_id	int64	Globally unique primary key for each comment.
articles[].comments[].content	string	Plain-text content of the comment (NFC-normalized).
articles[].comments[].date	timestamp[us]	Submission date/time of the comment.
documents	list	Ordered list of supporting documents attached to the consultation.
documents[].document_id	int64	Internal id of the document.
documents[].title	string	Title of the document.
documents[].url	string	URL of the document on opengov.gr.
documents[].type	string	Document type, one of law_draft, analysis, other_draft, other_report, deliberation_report, other.

Note on Timestamps

All timestamp[us] fields in this dataset (start_date, end_date, scraped_at, articles[].comments[].date) are stored as timezone-naive values (no timezone tag in the schema), but the wall-clock values represent Athens local time (Europe/Athens - EET in winter, EEST in summer). This matches the local time configured on the source platform opengov.gr, which is operated by the Greek government (EKDDA). The values are therefore not UTC and not US time. To work with these timestamps in a timezone-aware way, localize them on read, e.g.:

import pandas as pd
df = pd.read_parquet("opengov_deliberations_v2.parquet")
df["start_date"] = df["start_date"].dt.tz_localize(
    "Europe/Athens", ambiguous="NaT", nonexistent="shift_forward"
)

Dataset Statistics

• Consultations (rows): 1.168
• Articles (nested): 30.505
• Comments (nested): 348.380
• Documents (nested): 2.286
• Ministries covered: 36
• Coverage (consultation start dates): 2009-10-19 - 2026-03-31
• Scrape window: 2026-04-06 - 2026-04-08
• Size: 357,71 MB
• Words: 82.937.627 (counted on all natural-language fields, whitespace-separated)
• Tokens: 111.390.719 (counted on all natural-language fields with the nlpaueb/bert-base-greek-uncased-v1 WordPiece tokenizer, no special tokens, no truncation)

The fields included in the word/token count are: title, start_minister_message, end_minister_message, ministry.name, articles[].title, articles[].body_text, articles[].comments[].content, documents[].title. Identifiers, URLs, timestamps, and short categorical fields (ministry.code, documents[].type) are excluded.

Usage

This dataset is useful for:

• Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks for Modern Greek, especially in the legal and legislative register
• Argument mining, opinion analysis, and stance detection on civic-participation data
• Summarization, retrieval, and question answering over draft Greek legislation
• Civic-tech applications: tracking legislative activity, citizen engagement metrics, ministry-level analyses
• Building Greek language models, lexicons, or domain-adapted embeddings for the legal/policy domain
• Sociolinguistic and political-science research on Greek public deliberation 2009–2026

The text in articles[].body_text is extracted from the original HTML on opengov.gr via plain-text stripping and is whitespace- and unicode-normalized; users who require the original HTML formatting should refer back to the source URLs (articles[].url). Comment text (articles[].comments[].content) is preserved as submitted by users on the platform, with usernames anonymized at source by opengov.gr.

License

This dataset is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license.

The license is a forward-compatible upgrade of the CC BY 3.0 GR license under which opengov.gr itself releases its content. Per the official opengov.gr Terms of Use (operated by the National Centre for Public Administration and Local Government - EKDDA): "Το συνολικό περιεχόμενο του παρόντος δικτυακού τόπου διατίθεται στο κοινό με τους ειδικότερους όρους της Ελληνικής άδειας Creative Commons Αναφορά Προέλευσης (CC BY v.3.0)...". Citizen comments are also released under Creative Commons by participation, per the opengov.gr Πλαίσιο Αρχών. This is consistent with Greek Law 4727/2020 (art. 66) and EU Directive 2019/1024 on the re-use of public sector information.

When using this dataset, please attribute:

OpenGov Greek Public Deliberations v2, glossAPI (EELLAK), derived from the OpenGov.gr platform of the Hellenic Republic / National Centre for Public Administration and Local Government (EKDDA), licensed under CC BY 4.0.

Contact

For feedback contact: glossapi.team@eellak.gr