Maarten Marx of PoliticalMashup has written a post explaining the background to the project:
The PoliticalMashup project at the University of Amsterdam started collecting parliamentary proceedings in 2008. We started with Dutch proceedings and have since moved to collecting proceedings from other European states as well. 
Our aim is to transform all proceedings into a rich common XML format and store these into a single XML database system. With this database system we facilitated comparative diachronic research for historians, political scientists, linguists and communication scientists.
Currently we collect data from The Netherlands, the UK, Flanders, Germany, Denmark, Sweden and Norway.
The main problem in keeping the collecting up to date and going back as far as possible is changing data formats. The content and layout of the proceedings are in general very stable over time, but the technical formats differ much, especially in the “digital era” (starting roughly around 1995). For older material, OCR errors and badly placed scans form major challenges. Besides these challenges with the texts, much work is needed to recognize, disambiguate and link political entities (speakers, parties, constituencies, ministerial functions, etc) to existing databases.
Aims
After consultation with a panel of users consisting of scientists, journalists and archivists we decided to focus on the following aims:
- create a complete copy of the proceedings of the meetings in parliament;
- add metadata which record for each word spoken in parliament when it was said, who said it, in what role, on behalf of which party, and in which context. If possible, also indicate the type of speech act (e.g., speech from central lectern, interruption of a speech, shout from the benches, etc);
- give each entity a unique identifier which is resolvable by a Handle system comparable to the DOI system; do this for real entities (persons, parties) and textual objects (proceedings, topics, speeches, paragraphs, votes, etc);
- use these identifiers to link data to existing databases and link the parliamentary data to the Linked Open Data Cloud.
Available tools
Proceedings of the UK and the Netherlands are actively collected “until yesterday”. The collections start in 1935 (UK) and 1814 (NL) respectively. They can be downloaded and accessed through a Search Interface.
- Information on the used schemas
- Search in Dutch proceedings
- Analyse the active members during a parliamentary year (Only for NL)
- Information on the UK collection
Cooperation
DiLiPaD’s Dutch principal investigators Jaap Kamps and Maarten Marx collaborate with the Information Office of the Dutch House of Commons, the Dutch Royal Library, the Dutch National Archive, the Dutch Documentation Centre for Political Parties, and scientists from the Humanities, Social and Computer Sciences.