Open Government Act
Optimising the Woo process by providing a clear overview of the requested documents
About the project
During this project, led by PhD candidate Max Muller and organised by I-Partnership of the Dutch Government and the National Archive, Team Epoch develops an AI that will organise archived documents in a coherent time framework. This will disclose information by the Dutch government more efficiently and contribute to the Woo law of the government.
National Archive
The National Archive supports the Dutch government by permanently retaining information. Its mission revolves around ensuring universal access to information. By prioritizing the principles of findability, accessibility, readability, and interpretability, the National Archive aims to fulfil its mandate of facilitating public access to government documents.
Relevance
In May 2022, the Dutch Government introduced a new law: the ‘Wet Open Overheid’. This law aligns with Article 19 of the Universal Human Rights: the right to information. Currently, documents that arrive at the National Archive are not structured in a general contextual system, resulting in an accumulation of unstructured documents where the links between documents remain unclear. Consequently, there is a huge delay in processing information requests, this delay often exceeds up to months. To understand information held by the documents, a structure of timelines is required, to interpret the information. These timelines will help us understand the context the document was produced in, think of time, place and the people involved. Furthermore, it will show how separate documents are interlinked.
The goal of this project is to convince the government of the usability of the AI tool by producing a working example. Team Epoch will show that it is possible to write an AI that can structure the documents in timelines and will thereby act as a catalyst for further development.
Technical details
Our dataset consists of thousands of WOB-request dossiers containing millions of documents. Our task is to create an AI model that, given a dossier of documents, can organize these in a narrative map. A narrative map is a structure to organize events from a story in a visually rich way. It’s a graph where each event is its own node and the paths between the nodes represent similarity.
Unlike our previous competitions, this project does not come with training labels. This means that the progress made by the team cannot be tested on accuracy with a test data set. The narrative maps are also difficult to judge, which makes it hard to say whether a map “makes sense” or if one map is better than the other. In addition, there is no consensus on what makes a map “good”, which makes it a lot more difficult to train a model.
UN Sustainable Development Goals
This project directly contributes to SDG 16: Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions. By improving the accessibility and transparency of governmental information, Team
Epoch’s project aligns with the overarching goal of gaining public trust and engagement in governance processes, thus making the government a strong institution.
