---
language:
- el
license: cc-by-4.0
pretty_name: OpenGov Greek Public Deliberations v2
tags:
- greek
- deliberations
- public-consultation
- government
- civic-participation
- legislation
- legal
size_categories:
- 1K<n<10K
---

# OpenGov Greek Public Deliberations v2

**Dataset Info**

This dataset is a structured snapshot of the Greek government's public e-consultation platform [OpenGov.gr](https://www.opengov.gr) - the official portal where Greek ministries publish draft legislation and policy initiatives for article-by-article public commentary before they are tabled in the Hellenic Parliament. Each consultation typically covers a single bill or policy proposal and is opened for a fixed window during which citizens, civil-society organizations, professional bodies, and other stakeholders submit substantive comments.

The dataset is the **second iteration** (`v2`) of an earlier glossAPI release of the same source. Compared to the previous version, `v2` introduces a normalized nested schema (consultation → articles → comments), drops a large number of empty/redundant scraping-pipeline fields, parses date strings to native timestamps, and replaces the raw HTML article bodies with cleaned plain text (`body_text`).

The corpus contains **1,168 consultations** spanning **2009–2026**, hosted by **36 different Greek ministries**, including their full set of **30,505 legislative articles**, **348,380 citizen comments**, and **2,286 supporting documents** (impact analyses, reports, accompanying drafts). The data was scraped from `opengov.gr` between **2026-04-06** and **2026-04-08**.

The structure preserves the document hierarchy of an actual consultation:
- A **consultation** corresponds to a single piece of draft legislation or policy proposal posted by a ministry.
- Each consultation contains an ordered list of **articles** (`άρθρα`) of the draft.
- Each article contains an ordered list of **comments** submitted by citizens or organizations on that specific article.
- Each consultation can also contain associated **documents** (e.g. impact assessments, accompanying analyses, deliberation reports).

This shape makes the dataset suitable for both consultation-level analysis (legislative scope, ministry coverage, comment volume) and fine-grained NLP research over the actual textual content of the laws and the public reactions they elicited.

**Metadata Info**

The parquet has one row per consultation. The full schema, including nested lists, is:

| Path                                  | Type             | Description                                                                                       |
| ------------------------------------- | ---------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| `consultation_id`                     | int64            | Internal numeric primary key for the consultation.                                                |
| `post_id`                             | string           | WordPress post id assigned by `opengov.gr`.                                                       |
| `url`                                 | string           | Canonical URL of the consultation on `opengov.gr`.                                                |
| `title`                               | string           | Title of the consultation (typically the title of the draft law / policy initiative).             |
| `start_minister_message`              | string           | Opening message of the responsible minister introducing the consultation.                         |
| `end_minister_message`                | string           | Closing message of the minister published after the consultation period (may be empty).           |
| `start_date`                          | timestamp[us]    | Date/time the consultation was opened to the public.                                              |
| `end_date`                            | timestamp[us]    | Date/time the consultation was closed.                                                            |
| `scraped_at`                          | timestamp[us]    | Date/time this consultation was fetched from `opengov.gr` (per-row scrape provenance).            |
| `ministry`                            | struct           | Information about the originating ministry.                                                       |
| `ministry.ministry_id`                | int64            | Internal numeric id of the ministry.                                                              |
| `ministry.code`                       | string           | Short code used in `opengov.gr` URLs (e.g. `minenv`, `minfin`).                                   |
| `ministry.name`                       | string           | Official name of the ministry in Greek.                                                           |
| `ministry.url`                        | string           | URL of the ministry's section on `opengov.gr`.                                                    |
| `articles`                            | list<struct>     | Ordered list of legislative articles included in the draft under consultation.                    |
| `articles[].article_id`               | int64            | Internal id of the article.                                                                       |
| `articles[].title`                    | string           | Article heading as published.                                                                     |
| `articles[].url`                      | string           | Canonical URL of the article on `opengov.gr`.                                                     |
| `articles[].body_text`                | string           | Plain-text body of the article (extracted from the original HTML, NFC-normalized).                |
| `articles[].comments`                 | list<struct>     | Ordered list of citizen / organization comments on this specific article.                         |
| `articles[].comments[].comment_row_id`| int64            | Globally unique primary key for each comment.                                                     |
| `articles[].comments[].content`       | string           | Plain-text content of the comment (NFC-normalized).                                               |
| `articles[].comments[].date`          | timestamp[us]    | Submission date/time of the comment.                                                              |
| `documents`                           | list<struct>     | Ordered list of supporting documents attached to the consultation.                                |
| `documents[].document_id`             | int64            | Internal id of the document.                                                                      |
| `documents[].title`                   | string           | Title of the document.                                                                            |
| `documents[].url`                     | string           | URL of the document on `opengov.gr`.                                                              |
| `documents[].type`                    | string           | Document type, one of `law_draft`, `analysis`, `other_draft`, `other_report`, `deliberation_report`, `other`. |

**Note on Timestamps**

All `timestamp[us]` fields in this dataset (`start_date`, `end_date`, `scraped_at`, `articles[].comments[].date`) are stored as timezone-naive values (no timezone tag in the schema), but the wall-clock values represent **Athens local time** (`Europe/Athens` - EET in winter, EEST in summer). This matches the local time configured on the source platform `opengov.gr`, which is operated by the Greek government (EKDDA). The values are therefore *not* UTC and *not* US time. To work with these timestamps in a timezone-aware way, localize them on read, e.g.:

```python
import pandas as pd
df = pd.read_parquet("opengov_deliberations_v2.parquet")
df["start_date"] = df["start_date"].dt.tz_localize(
    "Europe/Athens", ambiguous="NaT", nonexistent="shift_forward"
)
```

**Dataset Statistics**

* Consultations (rows): 1.168
* Articles (nested): 30.505
* Comments (nested): 348.380
* Documents (nested): 2.286
* Ministries covered: 36
* Coverage (consultation start dates): 2009-10-19 - 2026-03-31
* Scrape window: 2026-04-06 - 2026-04-08
* Size: 357,71 MB
* Words: 82.937.627 (counted on all natural-language fields, whitespace-separated)
* Tokens: 111.390.719 (counted on all natural-language fields with the `nlpaueb/bert-base-greek-uncased-v1` WordPiece tokenizer, no special tokens, no truncation)

The fields included in the word/token count are: `title`, `start_minister_message`, `end_minister_message`, `ministry.name`, `articles[].title`, `articles[].body_text`, `articles[].comments[].content`, `documents[].title`. Identifiers, URLs, timestamps, and short categorical fields (`ministry.code`, `documents[].type`) are excluded.

**Usage**

This dataset is useful for:

* Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks for Modern Greek, especially in the legal and legislative register
* Argument mining, opinion analysis, and stance detection on civic-participation data
* Summarization, retrieval, and question answering over draft Greek legislation
* Civic-tech applications: tracking legislative activity, citizen engagement metrics, ministry-level analyses
* Building Greek language models, lexicons, or domain-adapted embeddings for the legal/policy domain
* Sociolinguistic and political-science research on Greek public deliberation 2009–2026

The text in `articles[].body_text` is extracted from the original HTML on `opengov.gr` via plain-text stripping and is whitespace- and unicode-normalized; users who require the original HTML formatting should refer back to the source URLs (`articles[].url`). Comment text (`articles[].comments[].content`) is preserved as submitted by users on the platform, with usernames anonymized at source by `opengov.gr`.

**License**

This dataset is licensed under the [Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) license.

The license is a forward-compatible upgrade of the [CC BY 3.0 GR](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/gr/) license under which `opengov.gr` itself releases its content. Per the official [`opengov.gr` Terms of Use](https://www.opengov.gr/home/%CF%8C%CF%81%CE%BF%CE%B9-%CF%87%CF%81%CE%AE%CF%83%CE%B7%CF%82) (operated by the National Centre for Public Administration and Local Government - EKDDA): *"Το συνολικό περιεχόμενο του παρόντος δικτυακού τόπου διατίθεται στο κοινό με τους ειδικότερους όρους της Ελληνικής άδειας Creative Commons Αναφορά Προέλευσης (CC BY v.3.0)..."*. Citizen comments are also released under Creative Commons by participation, per the [`opengov.gr` Πλαίσιο Αρχών](http://www.opengov.gr/home/?page_id=312). This is consistent with Greek Law 4727/2020 (art. 66) and EU Directive 2019/1024 on the re-use of public sector information.

When using this dataset, please attribute:

> *OpenGov Greek Public Deliberations v2*, glossAPI (EELLAK), derived from the OpenGov.gr platform of the Hellenic Republic / National Centre for Public Administration and Local Government (EKDDA), licensed under CC BY 4.0.

**Contact**

For feedback contact: glossapi.team@eellak.gr