Khaledc83/ratsvorlagen-korpus-de

German Municipal Council Documents (Ratsvorlagen-Korpus)

Full texts of municipal council documents from four German cities, prepared for training and evaluating language models. 43,127 documents, 302.9 million tokens (cl100k_base).

Mirror of the archived release on Zenodo: 10.5281/zenodo.21767760. The Zenodo record is the citable version of record; this repository exists so the data is usable where people actually look for German training corpora.

Why this corpus exists

German long-context material with a permissive licence is scarce. Municipal council documents are coherent, domain-dense administrative prose and, unlike most parliamentary corpora, largely unexplored. Included are council proposals (Beschlussvorlagen), motions (Anträge), formal enquiries (Anfragen) and information items (Informationsvorlagen), always the public part only.

What you get, and what you do not

Read this before you plan an experiment around it:

• Leipzig dominates. 62 % of all documents come from one city.
• Six budget plans carry about 10 % of all tokens. A handful of files skews any token-weighted statistic.
• The longest documents are numeric tables, not prose. If you need long-form German prose, the length distribution will mislead you. The single longest document has 7,375,767 tokens across 10,189 pages and is a budget appendix.
• 303 million tokens is small for pretraining. This is domain data and evaluation material, not a pretraining corpus on its own.

City	Documents	Tokens	Longest (tokens)	Licence
Leipzig	26,685	200.3 M	7,375,767	CC BY 4.0
Osnabrück	10,334	77.2 M	676,664	CC BY 4.0
Dresden	4,064	3.3 M	100,808	DL-DE/Zero 2.0
Freiburg im Breisgau	2,044	22.1 M	566,107	DL-DE/BY 2.0

Length distribution: 5,082 documents above 8K tokens, 1,540 above 32K, 388 above 100K. Duplicates across the whole corpus: 35 exact (SHA-256 over normalised text) and 265 near-duplicates (MinHash, 128 permutations, Jaccard >= 0.8).

Fields

JSONL, one document per line, UTF-8, zstd-compressed per city.

Field	Meaning
city_slug	city identifier
oparl_id	identifier in the source system
name, reference	title and official reference number
date, paper_type	date and document type
source_url	the exact source document
pdf_bytes, pages	size and page count of the source PDF
text	extracted full text
tokens_cl100k	token count (cl100k_base)
masked	whether contact data was replaced in this document
rolle, datei_name	Freiburg and Dresden only: main document or attachment

INDEX.csv.zst holds all 43,127 documents without the text, so distributions can be recomputed without downloading the archives. PREVIEW.jsonl contains 11 complete documents spanning the length classes. STATS.json has every figure in machine-readable form.

Provenance

Collected through the official OParl endpoints of the cities, source snapshot of 2026-07-29, retrieved 2026-07-31, 2026-08-01 and 2026-08-02, at one request per second per host (Dresden one per three seconds) with an identifying user agent. Retrieval success rates: Leipzig 85.7 %, Osnabrück 99.8 %, Dresden 41.9 %, Freiburg im Breisgau 94.4 %. No access restriction was circumvented; all endpoints are anonymously accessible.

Privacy

Contact details are masked: e-mail addresses, telephone and fax numbers and IBANs were replaced with placeholders (3,799 of 43,127 documents were affected). Personal names are kept, because council members and municipal staff act in an official capacity here and the texts lose their meaning without them. This is a deliberate decision, not an oversight.

Licence and attribution

The collection is CC BY 4.0, the strictest of the source licences. Each document carries its city's licence, verified directly at the OParl system endpoint. Please credit Stadt Leipzig, Stadt Osnabrück, Landeshauptstadt Dresden and Stadt Freiburg im Breisgau as sources of the respective documents.

Citation

@dataset{cherif_2026_ratsvorlagen,
  author    = {Cherif, Khaled},
  title     = {Ratsvorlagen-Korpus deutscher Kommunen: 43.127 Dokumente
               Long-Context-Verwaltungstext},
  year      = {2026},
  publisher = {Zenodo},
  doi       = {10.5281/zenodo.21767760}
}

---

Deutsche Kurzfassung

Volltexte kommunaler Ratsdokumente aus Leipzig, Osnabrück, Dresden und Freiburg im Breisgau: 43.127 Dokumente, 302,9 Mio. Tokens, CC BY 4.0, über die OParl-Schnittstellen der Städte erhoben. 1.540 Dokumente liegen über 32K Tokens, 388 über 100K.

Ehrlich zu den Grenzen: Leipzig stellt 62 Prozent der Dokumente, sechs Haushaltspläne tragen rund 10 Prozent aller Tokens, und die längsten Dokumente sind Zahlentabellen, keine Prosa. Kontaktdaten sind maskiert, Personennamen in amtlicher Funktion bleiben bewusst erhalten.

Zitierfassung mit DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21767760 Entstanden im Rahmen von InfraNode, einer schlüssellosen offenen Datenschnittstelle für deutsche Städte.