| --- |
| license: cc-by-4.0 |
| language: |
| - de |
| task_categories: |
| - text-generation |
| - fill-mask |
| - summarization |
| size_categories: |
| - 10K<n<100K |
| pretty_name: German Municipal Council Documents (Ratsvorlagen) |
| tags: |
| - german |
| - long-context |
| - public-administration |
| - government |
| - oparl |
| - open-government-data |
| - administrative-language |
| configs: |
| - config_name: default |
| data_files: |
| - split: train |
| path: ratsvorlagen_*.jsonl.zst |
| --- |
| |
| # 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](https://doi.org/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 |
|
|
| ```bibtex |
| @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](https://infranode.dev), einer schlüssellosen |
| offenen Datenschnittstelle für deutsche Städte. |
|
|
