TNG

Civic Tech: Parliamentary & Legislative Hyper-Search Engine

Civic Tech: Parliamentary Hyper-Search

A high-performance open-data civic tech engine delivering sub-10ms full-verbatim search across 74,027 parliamentary records and 1.89 billion characters spanning all 33 Kanagawa municipalities, the Prefectural Assembly, and the National Diet.

Kanagawa and National Diet Parliamentary Hyper-Search UI

1. Why We Built the Parliamentary Hyper-Search Engine

In local democracy and public advocacy, access to legislative records is crucial. However, government assembly minutes across Japan have long been isolated behind proprietary, fragmented ASP database systems (DiscussNet, DB-Search, Voices, SearchSystem). These legacy systems suffer from severe limitations: restrictive pagination, truncated speeches, lack of cross-municipal queries, and slow load times.

To break through these institutional silos, TNG Cooperative engineered a unified, zero-compromise Civic Tech search platform. We harvested, normalized, and indexed the complete verbatim debates of 41 legislative bodies: the National Diet (House of Representatives & House of Councillors), the Kanagawa Prefectural Assembly, designated major cities (Yokohama, Kawasaki, Sagamihara), and all 33 municipal town and village councils across Kanagawa Prefecture.

2. Key Features & Engineering Innovations

  • 74,027 Assembly Transcripts & 1.89 Billion Characters (100% Uncut Data): Unlike search summaries that crop speech context, our index contains the complete, unabridged verbatim dialogue for every speaker, committee hearing, and plenary debate.
  • Sub-10 Millisecond Local-First Performance (5.26ms average): Powered by an optimized in-memory inverted index and parallel query routing, delivering instantaneous search responses as you type.
  • Dual Search Modes (Smart NLP & Exact Phrase): Seamlessly switch between Smart NLP mode (expanding Japanese morphological inflections via UniDic/MeCab, Romaji phonetics, and English terms) and Exact phrase search for legal statute tracking.
  • Direct Source Provenance & Speaker Deep-Linking: Every search result provides direct one-click verification links to the original official government minutes page, timestamped parliamentary session numbers, and speaker transcripts.
  • Instant Multi-Tier Filtering: Rapidly isolate debate trends across the National Diet, Prefectural Assembly, designated cities, or individual town councils with instant hit counters.

3. Empowering Worker Cooperatives & Citizen Accountability

As a worker cooperative grounded in democratic governance and Catholic Social Teaching (CST), we believe technology should empower public oversight and community self-determination (subsidiarity). This engine allows citizen groups, non-profits, researchers, and cooperatives to transparently analyze how public policies—such as the Worker Cooperative Act (労働者協同組合法), municipal contracting rules, elderly care initiatives, and regional sustainability programs—are debated and decided by elected officials.

By transforming raw public data into an instantaneous, accessible civic resource, we foster an informed, participatory local democracy where citizens and workers have full visibility into the policies that shape their communities.