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Parliamentary websites have become one of the most important windows for citizens and media to follow the activities of their legislatures and to hold parliaments to account. Therefore, most parliamentary institutions aim to provide new multimedia solutions capable of displaying video fragments on demand on plenary activities. This paper presents a multimedia system for parliamentary institutions to produce video fragments on demand through a website with linked information and public feedback that helps to explain the content shown in these fragments. A prototype implementation has been developed for the Canary Islands Parliament (Spain) and shows how traditional parliamentary streaming systems can be enhanced by the use of semantics and computer vision for video analytics.The semantic web technologies used make search capabilities on parliamentary websites available to users to retrieve video fragments on demand with accurate and timely information. In addition, video analytic techniques enable the automation of identifying representative keyframes to be annotated by parliamentary experts. As a result, parliaments are able to enhance citizens' access to information and ensure that these institutions are more open and accountable on their websites and; at the same time, the labor-intensive tasks of parliamentary experts are considerably reduced.

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Part 2: Open GovernmentInternational audienceOpen Government poses broad challenges to contemporary parliaments with its emphasis not just on openness and transparency but also on participation and collaboration. The situational awareness obtained from citizen-sourcing and the advances in information and communications technology are key enablers for effective and efficient Open Government in parliamentary institutions. Citizen-sourcing, on one hand, may help parliaments be more sensible and effective because citizens are able to improve parliaments’ situational awareness and then influence direction and outcomes for policy making process. On the other hand, exploiting the opportunities created by the emerging ICT paradigms allows parliaments to put Open Government into practice in an efficient way. This paper presents a situational awareness process model to support effective decision-making with citizens’ insights. Based on this model, an architecture for situational awareness-based information services is presented. This architecture makes use of the opportunities that cloud computing paradigm, social media applications and semantic enrichment offer to provide an efficient implementation of Open Government in parliaments. A motivating scenario of the proposed architecture is illustrated to show a use case of a situational awareness-based information service, which has the potential to function as a new mechanism of relationship between a parliament and its citizens to enable collective knowledge in order to enhance the passage of a draft bill