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Federated Corpus ​

Dutch legislation is produced by many authorities: Parliament, ministers, 342 municipalities, 12 provinces, 21 water boards. Maintaining all regulations in a single repository does not match this reality.

The federated corpus model lets each authority maintain their own regulations in their own Git repository. The engine discovers and loads laws from all sources through a registry.

The registry ​

A corpus-registry.yaml file lists all regulation sources:

yaml
schema_version: "1.0"
sources:
  - id: minbzk-central
    name: "MinBZK Central Corpus"
    type: github
    github:
      owner: MinBZK
      repo: regelrecht-corpus
      branch: main
      path: regulation/nl
    scopes: []
    priority: 1

  - id: amsterdam
    name: "Gemeente Amsterdam"
    type: github
    github:
      owner: gemeente-amsterdam
      repo: regelrecht-amsterdam
      branch: main
      path: regulation/nl
    scopes:
      - type: gemeente_code
        value: "GM0363"
    priority: 10
    auth_ref: amsterdam

Each source declares:

  • Where to find the regulations (a GitHub repository or local directory)
  • Scope (jurisdiction claims, like gemeente_code: GM0363 for Amsterdam)
  • Priority (lower number = higher priority, used when the same law appears in multiple sources)

How it works ​

The engine merges laws from all registered sources into a single corpus at load time. Scope information is used to filter: when executing for a person in Amsterdam, only Amsterdam's municipal ordinances apply.

The implements mechanism from Inversion of Control works across repositories. Amsterdam's afstemmingsverordening (in Amsterdam's repo) can implement open terms from the Participatiewet (in the central repo). The engine does not care which repository a file came from.

Local overrides ​

Developers can add a corpus-registry.local.yaml (gitignored) to add personal sources during development. This file extends the main registry without affecting the shared configuration.

Authentication ​

Credentials for private repositories are stored separately from the manifest. The registry uses auth_ref identifiers that map to environment variables (CORPUS_AUTH_{ID}_TOKEN) or a corpus-auth.yaml file. No secrets in the manifest itself.

Editor integration ​

Municipalities can edit, validate, and submit their regulations through the web editor without needing a development environment. The editor writes directly to the appropriate GitHub repository via the Contents API, creating branches and pull requests.

Further reading ​