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VIII Annual Meeting of the Asia Pacific Parliamentary Forum
(Canberra, Australia, January 8-14, 2000)
Technological Working Committee Report on the progress of the APOINT 2001 Plan
BACKGROUND
The Technology Working Committee of the Asia Pacific Parliamentary Forum (APPF), comprising Australia, Japan, Korea, Peru, and Thailand, met in Lima, Peru, on September 6, 1998.
Upon the base of previously submitted documents, the following agreements were made:
Approve the progress made by the Peruvian Congress in the design of the APPF web site in its condition of host country of the APPF home page.
Proceed with the execution of the Apoint 2001 Plan in the way proposed and already being implemented in Peruvian Parliament in accordance with the terms approved at the 6th Annual Meeting held in Seoul, Korea.
Follow the suggestion made by the members of the Australian Delegation to have a completely open information network.
Entrust the Thai Delegation with the creation of a legal framework that would define the concept of the essential laws to facilitate the load of information onto the Legislative Exchange System database.
Incorporate the request of the Korean Delegation to develop and provide the Web hosting service in their region and help create the relevant homepages of the parliaments who lack a web site.
Follow the Australian Delegation's proposal to create and keep an updated directory of the e-mail addresses of all member countries of the APPF as well as individual parliamentarians.
Accept the proposal of the Japanese Delegation that each country, in their respective Parliament Websites, should provide a direct link to the APPF Web page.
The APPF Executive Committee met on September 7-8, 1998, and heard reports on the progress of the design of the web site and the establishment of the Legislative Exchange System, as well as of the agreements made by the Technology Working Committee, making the decision to discuss the report again in the next Executive Committee Meeting, prior to the Annual Meeting.
At the Executive Committee held on January 11, 1999, the aforesaid report was included among the items of the agenda for the 7th Annual Meeting. Finally, at the 7th Annual Meeting held on January 11-14, 1999, in Lima, Peru, the Committee Chairman made a presentation before the Annual Meeting on the progress made and the agreements reached by the Technology Working Committee.
At this meeting, the Korean representative offered to develop and provide a web hosting service to the countries in its subregion. Likewise, the representative of Japan reported on the progress of the development of a multilingual software to facilitate communication among member countries, as part of its contribution to the implementation of the APOINT 2001 plan.
PROGRESS MADE ALONG 1999
New web server software
The Peruvian Congress, in keeping with its cooperation policy towards the Asia Pacific Parliamentary Forum, has installed new software for the APPF web server, Lotus Notes R5, which supports multimedia applications, thus improving the sending and receipt of audio and video signals, included in the development of the APOINT .
Changes in the APPF web site
All of the information of the web site has been updated and improved by adding some text to all of the icons in order to facilitate understanding, and providing information not previously available.
Spanish version of the APPF web site
Working towards the implementation of a multilingual environment, a Spanish version of the web site for the APPF has been created, thus taking the first step to the creation of APPF home pages in the other languages of the Asia Pacific region.
Other important changes:
Executive Committee
Information concerning the number, qualifications, and term of office for Executive Committee members has been updated to conform to the terms of the agreements of the 7th Annual Meeting .
Welcome Message
A welcome message given by the APPF President, the Hon. Yasuhiro Nakasone, has been included, extending an invitation to contribute to the formation of the Asia Pacific family.
Colombian Parliament Web Site
A link to the web site for the Parliament of Colombia, whose membership was formalized at the 7th Annual Meeting in Lima, Peru, was included in the Member Countries section.
Parliament of Fiji Web Site
The web site for the Parliament of Fiji has been conveniently placed at the Related Links page. Additionally, arrangements were made to have this web site included in the database of the Inter Parliamentary Union, from where it is currently accessible.
New Icons
a) Brief History of the APPF
With the purpose of providing a comprehensive view of its institutional evolvement, an icon about the background information of the APPF has been created
b) Working Groups
Information concerning the nature and duties of these groups, with an emphasis on the Technology Working Group, has also been placed.
Milestone Declarations
Both the Tokyo Declaration and the Vancouver Declaration have been placed under a new link, given their milestone character in the development of this inter parliamentary organization.
Changes in the APOINT format
In order to facilitate its review and downloading, the APOINT plan format was changed from PDF to its present HTML version since information had been received reporting difficulties on the download in the previous format. The HTML format allows an easy reading and location of the different sections of the plan.
Electronic Directory
A directory of electronic mail addresses has been created for the participants in the APPF in their condition of national representatives. However, cooperation is requested from member countries to keep it regularly updated. To this end, delegates to this Meeting are asked to contribute their email addresses.
III. PENDING MATTERS
Member countries should consider the following pending matters:
Total incorporation of member countries to the Internet
Currently, 80% of member countries have a parliamentary web site on line, which shows the remarkable effort made by the parliaments of the region to enter the world wide web, making it possible to implement the APOINT.
Last year, two more countries, the Kingdom of Cambodia and Indonesia, have accessed the Internet. Therefore, only four countries do not have access to the web yet:
Laos
Marshall Islands
Papua New Guinea, and
Vietnam
The Technology Working Committee reiterates its commitment to give these countries all the necessary support to create their web sites through technical assistance provided by committee members. Korea reiterated its offer to create and host the web pages for the aforementioned countries and will discuss this matter with those countries' delegates during the course of this meeting.
Legislative Exchange System
Members of the Section on Library and Research Services for Parliaments of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) at its 65th General Conference held in Bangkok, on 27 August 1999, made an agreement to support the implementation of the APOINT 2001 Plan, which gives way to the incorporation of parliamentary libraries in the development of the said plan. In that respect, the Library of Congress of the Republic of Peru has had the initiative of inviting other parliamentary libraries of the Asia Pacific region to participate in this joint endeavor, having received to date the positive response of about 50% of the parliamentary libraries of APPF member countries.
Considering that the implementation of the Legislative Exchange System is an essential part of the APOINT, since it is expected to generate an unprecedented flow of information within the organization, the Technological Committee is currently assessing the possibility of delegating the responsibility of providing and entering legal information onto the APPF database to the parliamentary libraries, since they are, in most of the cases, the depositories of the national legislation, and consequently, they are in a privileged position to achieve the goals of the plan.
An alternative technical solution was proposed by Australia to hasten the development of the Legislative Exchange System, by simplifying the data collection process.
Basically, a Web Crawler would be used to automatically create a consolidated index on the APPF Web site of the various existing databases that already contain the legislation of the member countries.
The Thai delegation would create a recommended set of keywords to cover each of the topics of interest to the APPF [Environment, Economics etc]
These keywords could then be used, in conjunction with a search engine located on the APPF Web Site, by searchers from anywhere on the Internet, to search the consolidated index, and so arrive at a list of legislative documents that met their search requirements. [The diagram below indicates the possible search process.]
The keywords may need to be translated into local languages to allow searches of non-English databases, although some search engines may offer this as an automatic feature for a number of languages [though not all].
Once the documents are retrieved, in their local languages, it would be the responsibility of the recipient to decide which ones to have formally translated into their own preferred language.
This alternative removes the need to store large numbers of document addresses at the APPF Web site, and so considerably reduces the amount of time and effort required to establish and administer the Legislative Exchange System.
Legal Framework
The Legislative Exchange System requires the adoption of uniform criteria to develop the legal framework to define the concept of essential laws to facilitate this process, which is being worked out by the Delegation of Thailand, in accordance with the agreement reached at the latest Technological Committee meeting, held in September, 1998, in Lima, Peru. The Thai Delegation reported that it had prepared a more detailed subject index, copies of which will be distributed to Working Group members shortly for their consideration.
Direct Link to APPF web site
Cooperation of member countries is again strongly requested to provide a direct link to the APPF web site in their respective parliamentary web sites. To date, the following parliaments have created the requested link:
Australia
Japan
Peru
Multilingual Environment
Related to the issue of obtaining information from many databases is that of reading non-Roman scripts. It will be necessary to transpose many documents and keywords from one language script to another - say from Chinese characters to Roman [ie Western] characters.
The Japanese delegation has investigated this issue and found that the latest version of Microsoft Internet Explorer [version 5] has such transposition features built in, at least for the more widely used languages, such as Japanese and Chinese.
It was thus felt that no purpose-built software needed to be created by the APPF to perform such character conversions.
It was also noted that these transpositions are not language translations, but merely conversions from one language script to another. [For example, a representation of a Japanese document in Western (Roman) script would still be in the Japanese language.] Full language translation is still not a process that can be reliably achieved by automated means.
RECOMMENDATIONS
The Meeting encourages the parliaments of all APPF countries that still lack a web site to make a final effort to join the World Wide Web.
The Meeting recommends that each parliament identify the technological group or person that is responsible for coordinating their parliament's activities associated with the Technological Working Group and advise the Peruvian parliament, who is hosting the APPF web site, of that group or persons contact information.
The Meeting recommends that each parliament provide the Peruvian parliament with the email addresses of members of parliament and staff who are involved with APPF work so that the information can be included in the electronic directory on the APPF web site.
The Meeting strongly recommends that all member countries provide a direct link to the APPF web site from their respective parliamentary web sites.
The Meeting recommends to hasten the development of the Legislative Exchange System, a Web Crawler be used to automatically create a consolidated index on the APPF web site of the various existing databases that already contain the legislation of the member countries.
January, 2000