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haveyoursay

This is a simple tool to retrieve and store data from the European Union's public consultation platform "Have your say". Data is stored in an SQLite database. The tool can collect initiative and feedback data, download attached files and create CSV datasets of the collected data.

Data structure

The "Have Your Say" API provides data on initiatives with publications nested within them. Publications can have feedback and attached files. Feedback can also have attached files. The data structure is as follows:

  • Initiatives contain
    • Publications contain
      • Publication attachments
      • Feedback contain
        • Feedback attachments

The tool re-creates this structure in an SQLite database but stores only the necessary raw JSON responses and extracts the relevant information on-the-fly when needed.

Installation

  1. Clone the repository and navigate to the project folder
git clone https://github.com/ghxm/haveyoursay.git
cd haveyoursay
  1. Install the dependencies
pip install -r requirements.txt

Usage

The tool provides a CLI interface with three modes of operation: collect, download, and dataset.

python haveyoursay.py [common options] <mode> [mode options]

The common options are:

  • --db or -d: Path to the SQLite database file. Default is haveyoursay.db.
  • --verbose or -v: Enable verbose output.

See this help message for more information:

python haveyoursay.py --help

Replace <mode> with one of the following options:

  • collect: Collects data from the European Commission Have Your Say website. This should be run first. Use --update to only request data not already in the database and --wait to specify seconds to wait in between requests.
  • download: Downloads publication and feedback attachments from the collected data.
    • Use --directory to specify the output directory for the attachments.
    • Use --only to specify the type(s) of documents to download (default is both publication and feedback attachments).
    • Attachments can be further filtered by --publication-type and --language to reduce the number of files to download.
  • dataset: Creates meta and text datasets from the collected data and output them as csv files.
    • Optional <dataset_type> argument can be specified (meta or text datasets, default is meta), where meta produces datasets from the raw metadata retreived via collect beforehand and text extracts text from the attachments downloaded via download.
    • Use --directory to specify the output directory for the dataset,
    • --attachments to include attachment datasets, --only to specify the type(s) of documents to create datasets for, and --merge to merge all datasets into a single dataset (only valid for meta datsets).
    • For text datasets, --input-directory can be to specify a custom directory for the text files.

See this help message for more information:

python haveyoursay.py <mode> --help

Note

Note that the publications dataset contains ~ 35 duplicate publications (as of spring 2024). These are not removed from the dataset to preserve the original data as closely as possible. All publications can be uniquely identified by the id field in combination with the initiative_id field.

The tool will automatically create the necessary tables in the database if they do not exist and document all runs in a logfile.

Project structure

The project is structured as follows:

  • haveyoursay.py - the main script that contains the CLI interface
  • src/ - folder containing the modules with the main functionality
    • collect.py - the data collection module
    • download.py - the attachment download module
    • dataset.py - the dataset creation module
    • utils.py - utility functions