MPs rush to sign up to legal data mining service

Political publishing group Dods has launched an legal information service based on technology from database provider MarkLogic.

Dods Legislation allows users to mine unstructured data from the European Commission and the European Parliament in order to track clauses or entire bills as they are updated or changed.

The service, which costs between £6,000 and £16,000 per person, will be made available to the company's 500 clients in the UK and 130 clients in Europe.

MPs, who can access the service for free, are keen to use it, according to Simon Thompson, managing director of Dods.

"Some 100 MPs had signed up to the service within a day of launch. The ability to comprehensively search this information is clearly of benefit to them."

Thompson said that although the company had originally been looking for an open-source solution, there was nothing available that provided the same support as the MarkLogic database.

Thompson also explained that the database would end the need for manual tagging.

"Tagging information, which had been done by hand, will no longer be necessary because the database from MarKLogic is able to understand all the unstructured human-generated data that comes out of the commission and parliament."

The database sorts many types of differently formatted text-centric and unstructured data.

The company also has plans to launch a relational mapping tool that will look at "who does what with whom", according to Thompson. This service is likely to launch in the fourth quarter of this year.

It is also looking into launching a sentiment analysis tool for gauging the weight of pro and anti sentiment among lobbyists.

The company is currently training an in-house development team to evolve the MarkLogic database.

"We will work with account managers, clients and reviews to develop the MarkLogic database in an agile fashion," Thompson said.