Web-based system for Japanese local political documents

Purpose This paper aims to propose a Web-based system for visualizing local politics in Japan. Although many local governments in Japan provide public access to political documents, researchers and scientists cannot take full advantage of them because they consist only of raw text. Therefore, there is a need for these to be converted into panel data and to visualize differences by region or over time. For ordinary citizens, visualizing differences between the topics discussed by assembly members can be useful in assessing their characteristics. The proposed system aims to provide a complete solution that meets all of these requirements. Design/methodology/approach The system has five main functions: full-text search for political documents, showing keywords in context, map and time-series visualization, cross-tabulation and political keyword extraction. Although three existing systems offer some of these functions, the proposed system integrates all the five necessary functions and provides a complete solution that meets all of the requirements. Findings The proposed system is demonstrated to be a complete solution for the requirements based on the comparisons with the existing systems and use cases. Originality/value The proposed system, which integrates all the five necessary functions and even adds a new cross-tabulation function, meets all the requirements and is a complete solution for researchers, scientists and ordinary citizens.