Parliamentary informatics is the application of information technology to the documentation of legislative activity. The principal areas of concern are the provision, in a form conveniently readable to humans or machines, of information and statistics about: individual legislators particular legislative proposals votes thereon text of legislation Parliamentary informatics is carried on both by officials of legislatures and by private for-profit and non-profit actors, with motivations ranging from the administration of parliaments to lobbying and facilitating democratic discourse. The division of activities between official and unofficial activity differs widely between polities, even within a single country. There exists substantial overlap with disciplines such as psephology and, as far as the text of successfully enacted legislation is concerned, legal informatics in general. The use of parliamentary informatics is also a rapidly growing trend in parliamentary monitoring. In a September 2011, joint report from the National Democratic Institute and World Bank Institute, a survey of parliamentary monitoring organisations (PMOs) found that parliamentary informatics are used by approximately 40 percent of PMOs worldwide. The report states, "These tools can automatically aggregate and organize information from parliamentary websites and other information sources, generate visualizations (such as political finance maps), and create new platforms for citizens to interact with MPs or participate in parliamentary monitoring and policy analysis." Issues Access to parliamentary information is the most significant issue in parliamentary informatics; access may be inhibited technologically through the provision of parliamentary information in a form not amenable to processing by machines, or legally, by copyright or other protection of the parliamentary record. Ultimately, it may be possible to provide citizens with a comprehensive overview of all the legislation going through parliaments everywhere in the world, which would allow the tracking of the implementation of international treaties and of general legislative trends. In a September 2011 report from the National Democratic Institute and World Bank Institute on parliamentary monitoring organisations, open data is cited as a fundamental issue for further development. The report explains, "While they have proven effective in many instances, the most useful informatics tools require the availability of parliamentary data in machine-readable or "open data" formats, which remains a challenge in many contexts." Around the world International see details at Akoma Ntoso Akoma Ntoso (Architecture for Knowledge-Oriented Management of African Normative Texts using Open Standards and Ontologies) is an initiative of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA) that proposes an