Legislation 45% open

What data is expected?

This data category requires all national laws and statutes available to be available online, although it is not a requirement that information on legislative behaviour e.g. voting records is available. To satisfy this category, the following minimum criteria must be met:

• Content of the law / status
• If applicable, all relevant amendments to the law
• Date of last amendments
• Data should be updated at least on quarterly

What data is available

•   Openly licensed? No (No URL given)
•   Is the data available for free? Yes
•   Is the data machine readable? No (n/a)
•   Available in bulk? No
•   Is the data provided on a timely and up to date basis? Yes
•   Publicly available? Yes published by Latvijas Vēstnesis)
•   Is data in digital form? Yes
•   Is the data available online? Yes (Here)
•   Does the data exist? Yes

Details

Likumi.lv is a legislation website ensuring free access to systematized (consolidated) legislation of the Republic of Latvia. Its operation is regulated by the Law on Official Publications and Legal Information. - http://likumi.lv/about.php

• likumi.lv is for systematized, consolidated laws and other legislative acts (complete texts) while https://www.vestnesis.lv/ publishes official decisions which are incremental (you may have separate publications for the initial law and tens of amendments. - if there are any inconsistencies between these two sources, what was published in Latvijas Vēstnesis is the official version. That's why the law states that Latvijas Vēstnesis is the official publication and likumi.lv is for "informative purposes".

The official publisher Latvijas Vestnesis does not receive budget funding for maintenance of Likumi.lv. It is maintained from the earnings of Latvijas Vestnesis (the costs are covered from the charge for the official publication paid by the information submitter, unless otherwise provided by a law or Cabinet Regulations).

Regarding information reuse Likumi.lv points to the legislation that determines how this information can be reused and sets the fee for reuse (however, it is not clear what is meant by reuse and if, e.g., publishing law excerpts on a website requires paying the fee or not):

• http://likumi.lv/doc.php?id=254491
• http://likumi.lv/doc.php?id=249322#p18

See also:

• The State of Open Data in Latvia: 2014. Baltic J. Modern Computing, Vol. 2 (2014), No. 3, 160-170 - http://arxiv.org/abs/1406.5052

Update (2015): the situation is the same as in 2014. This data is free to read but definitely not openly licensed as its terms of use state that:

• there is a fee for data reuse
• you may publish links to its entries (i.e. deep links to the website) provided that you attribute the data source

Reviewer comments

The submission seems to be correct.