Apr 02, 2021 12:00:00

I tried using the web service 'LawHub' that visualizes the bill submitted to the Diet in an easy-to-understand manner

The official website of the House of Representatives

publishes a list of submitted bills, but each bill has a format called 'revised text ', which can be difficult to read. The open source web service ' LawHub ' displays the difficult-to-read Diet bills in a colorful and easy-to-understand manner, so I actually tried using it.

LawHub | Visualize bills submitted to the Diet in a differential format like GitHub.
https://lwhb.github.io/

The top page of Law Hub looks like this. Click 'Click here for bills currently under deliberation' to check the bills submitted to the Diet.

Then, the Pull Request page of GitHub where the bills were lined up was displayed. At the time of writing the article, Law Hub has registered the bills for the 201st Diet convened in 2020. Click on the bill for which you want to check the details ...

The reason for submitting the bill and

information on the progress of the bill deliberation are displayed. To see what was amended by the 'Bill for Partial Amendment of the Act on Special Measures for Strengthening Financial Functions', click 'Files Changed' at the top.

Then,

using the difference display function of GitHub, you can compare the sentence before the change (red) and the sentence after the change (green) side by side.

If you check the part that was actually revised, the notation changed from 'all' to 'all' ...

You can see that the date has been changed from '2020 (2022 AD)' to '8th year of Reiwa (2026 AD)'.

On the top page of LawHub, it seems that you can check the list of bills by parliamentary disclosure, so I tried to check the list of bills

actually submitted at the 200th Diet ...

At the time of writing the article, it was displayed as 'No result' and could not be viewed.

According to a tweet from the developer of LawHub, LawHub was released in January 2020, but 'the language processing of the revised text was complicated' and 'each ministry and agency has published a new and old comparison table'. It is said that the update is stopped because of.

(2 / n) Unfortunately, development is currently stopped. The reason is that it was technically difficult to interpret the revised text mechanically and accurately, and above all, the official material in the difference format called 'new and old comparison table' is published on the website of each ministry and agency. Because I understood.

— LawHub (@lawhubtokyo) April 1, 2021

On the other hand, 'I think it's still an interesting attempt to manage the law as a PR with Git,' the developer said.

On the other hand, managing the law with Git and managing the amendment as PR is still an interesting attempt. The fact that the editing history of the law is managed in a natural way not only makes it easy to refer to past versions, but also has the advantage of understanding the flow of law revisions. I would like to continue thinking about it in the future.

— LawHub (@lawhubtokyo) April 1, 2021

In addition, the developers of LawHub have also released 'PolitityLink', a web service that allows you to check information on the Diet in a timeline format.

PolityLink
https://politylink.jp/