BesluitBron opens up the Dutch public decision-making process to an AI assistant. A councillor, a journalist or a civil servant asks a question in everyday language. The assistant retrieves the answer directly from the registers themselves: council information from 310 municipalities, 8 provinces and 13 water authorities, the Tweede Kamer register, official publications from central government and published court rulings.
BesluitBron is not a search engine with a chat window attached to it. It is a collection of connectors based on the Model Context Protocol. An assistant such as Claude uses these to search directly within the source registers. Every answer can thus be traced back to a source that the reader can access themselves.
BesluitBron is an initiative of the Common Sense in Action Foundation. It is available under the EUPL-1.2 and can be used free of charge, without the need for an account.
Features
BesluitBron offers:
- Access to seven public source platforms from a single product, each with its own address and its own toolkit.
- Results which, for each search query, state exactly how precise they are, in accordance with the rules set out at Zoekprecisie.
- A management console featuring an explorer for each platform, a request log and a dashboard, as described at Beheerconsole.
- Full transparency regarding the source: each result is accompanied by the source from which it originates; see Bronvermelding.
Download
BesluitBron runs as a public service at besluitbron.nl and does not need to be installed. Anyone wishing to run the service within their own organisation should request the source code. This is licensed under the EUPL 1.2. A ready-to-use container image is not yet available, so the image must be built from the source code. See Installatie.
Supported Platforms
BesluitBron runs on Linux, macOS and Microsoft Windows. The container image built from the source code is available for Linux on amd64 and arm64.
Configuration
Each platform has its own switch and its own settings block. How these work is explained at Connectorregister. Information on where a setting for this installation comes from, and the order in which one location overrides another, can be found at Instellingen Overschrijven.
Topics
The following sections cover usage:
- Conceptens: the terms that recur throughout the rest of the documentation, from the protocol to the handling of personal data;
- Architectuurs: how the product works and what happens when a single query is made;
- Bronnen: the source platforms, what’s included and what isn’t, along with the MCP address and the tools available on each platform;
- Connectoren: the eight MCP addresses side by side, and the address that provides all sources at once;
- Proceduress: connecting, querying and managing;
- Schermen: every screen of the service, both public and behind the login, accompanied by an image;
- API: the service’s two machine-readable addresses, with an interactive overview of them.