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Officiële Bekendmakingen Open Raadsinformatie OpenBesluitvorming OpenTK Rechtspraak Tweede Kamer Not connected Documentation
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OpenTK

Last changed on .

OpenTK is an independent index of the text of parliamentary documents. The index was created and is maintained by Bert Hubert as a one-man project, using the tkconv software. It can be found at opentk.nl .

It is the only place where the full text of parliamentary documents can be searched.

What it adds

The official service of the Tweede Kamer registers the documents, but only searches their titles. OpenTK does four things in addition to that:

  • It retrieves every attachment – the actual PDF or Word files – and extracts the text from them;
  • it performs OCR on scans that do not yield any text, in Dutch, and then uses the corrected file;
  • it places that text into a single searchable index, which returns a search result in 200 to 900 milliseconds;
  • It adds two corpora that the Tweede Kamer itself has never made accessible: the Woo publications from 616 publishing government bodies on open.overheid.nl, and the online consultations on draft legislation.
flowchart TD
    TK["Data warehouse<br/>Tweede Kamer"] --> P["tkconv<br/>collection,<br/>text extraction, OCR"]
    WOO["open.overheid.nl<br/>Woo, 616 organs"] --> P
    IC["internetconsultatie.nl"] --> P
    P --> FTS[("Searchable index<br/>full text")]
    BB["BesluitBron"] --> FTS

What it isn’t

OpenTK is by no means an authoritative source. It is an index compiled by a volunteer and not a register maintained by a governing body. A hit in OpenTK simply proves that the text appears in the retrieved file. Parliament’s decisions can be found at Tweede Kamer.

The rule of thumb: use OpenTK to find something, and verify your findings with the official source before including them in an article.

On 14 August 2026, the administrator publicly invited users to make programmatic use of the search service. This was accompanied by a warning: broad search queries are resource-intensive, for example, individual, commonly occurring words. This authorisation relates to the search service and not to the bulk retrieval of content.

BesluitBron adheres to that limit: it searches via the service and does not systematically retrieve the entire corpus.

Other restrictions

  • One person manages the whole system. This limits availability and continuity. BesluitBron therefore treats an outage of this source as the failure of a single connector rather than a service outage;
  • The Woo publications on open.overheid.nl are publications by administrative bodies and not parliamentary decisions. A reply should make that distinction; see Bronvermelding.

Address and tools

Address: https://besluitbron.nl/mcp/opentk/v1. The old address without /v1 will remain accessible.

  • search_documents: full-text search across the three corpora;
  • get_document_text: the text of a single document, including text extracted from a scan using OCR;
  • get_activity: a single parliamentary activity and the related documents;
  • list_woo_publishers: the 616 public bodies that publish on open.overheid.nl. This is the starting point for finding out what a particular administrative body has published under the Open Government Act;
  • recent_documents: recent additions to the index;
  • data_freshness: the latest point up to which the index is up to date. This tool exists because a response from a third party’s index is only useful if it is known how up to date that index is;
  • list_platform_calls: the calls to the platform in this session.

In addition, list_capabilities.

Where to find this platform

These addresses belong to the organisation behind this source and not to BesluitBron. Anyone who finds an error in the data or in this source’s API should report it there:

This platform runs on a single administrator’s machine and does not have separate API documentation. The ‘readme’ file included with the source code is all there is.

These addresses were checked on 18 August 2026. No email address has been included deliberately: where a party publishes only an address, BesluitBron refers to the page on which that address appears.

What this source is suitable for

For finding a text based on a word that appears in it. And for the two corpora that are not found anywhere else in BesluitBron: the Woo publications from 616 organisations and the online consultations on draft legislation.

What it is not for

To substantiate a claim about what Parliament has decided. This source is in no way authoritative. Please verify any findings with Tweede Kamer or Officiële Bekendmakingen before including them in an article.

Current situation, as of August 2026

On 16 August 2026, the harvest from this platform was 106 seconds old. That age refers to the metadata: the fact that a piece exists, along with its number, title and date.

It does not cover the text of that document, and that distinction is the most important thing a user needs to know here. The Tweede Kamer does indeed make its documents available. It only publishes a clean text version for about one in four of them; the rest are scans or PDFs without a text layer. OpenTK then retrieves such a document, extracts the text using OCR and indexes it. These are subsequent stages of the same process.

The implication for a search query is that an article published this morning can be found here by its title before it can be found by its content. The platform does not specify how long this interim period lasts.

This platform is the only one of the seven that publishes its own loading status via its API, including a harvest and conversion lifespan. The Laadstatus uses this data directly rather than deriving it.