Index

Welcome to Demobel! This is a personal volunteer project to try and combine my interests in informatics and politics into an accessible website project that's unique in the world.

📑 Official records, independently maintained

All information can be traced back to the original source. This is very important since trying to find and connect all that information on the source websites themselves can be a very laborious task.

🔎 Powerful search engine

You can consult and search through tens of thousands of discussion records using the Demobel search engine, made possible by PostgreSQL's amazing performance and indexing capabilities. More search options are in the pipeline and will become available in the near future.

Also, don't forget that all modern browsers today are equipped with page search capabilities. On normal computers you can activate this using Ctrl+F. On mobile phones, this option is available in the browser menu.

🌍 Accessible for all

All Belgians should have the right to consult official documents in all of the three official Belgian languages. Unfortunately, it's clear that our governments still have a long way to go in that regard.
By using a state-of-the-art translator, Demobel (and the entirety of this website) go a big step further than that, by being available in seven languages. Of course, computers are not able to correctly translate like humans can, and this requires a lot of time to review. That is why all texts are marked with a translation status to inform you about the verification status.
However, accessibility is more than just a matter of language. This entire website is written using the latest standards and technologies, and should be accessible for the visual impaired, people with bad connections, all devices and all browsers, including text-based ones.

I hope you enjoy using Demobel as much as I enjoy writing it.

⚠️ Data errors

Demobel could only exist with extensive help of so-called heuristic algorithms, custom-made and maintained by myself. This means that reaching perfection is a very iterative process, and the data can sometimes differ from the official documents. Fixing these issues is extremely time-consuming work, and I have other obligations as well, so sometimes I'm forced to leave the data as-is, "without any warranty".

That's why I also always refer to the primary sources, but I don't think that's enough. So here, I list the errors that I have discovered myself, and that will be fixed as soon as possible:

• For rejected propositions: Discussions are often not available. This warning is repeated on the affected propositions.
• For propositions until 2006: Some discussions are held for multiple propositions. Due to an extraction error, this sometimes overlaps with totally unrelated propositions. When this occurs, a warning is repeated on top of the discussions list.
• Not all propositions have voting information attached to them. This warning is repeated on the affected propositions.
• For propositions until 2006: The listed votings are almost completely correct, but it's possible that some of the representatives that did cast a vote are missing. This can be at most 3 persons, which does not skew the results too much. But it's a bug nonetheless, so a fix is bound to happen.

These are the bugs that I'm currently aware of. Should you find something else that seems ridiculous on Demobel, I encourage you to let me know, so I can take the appropriate actions.