Woogle — the Dutch NLP Search Engine for 3 Million Freedom-of-Information Files, Now Being Tested on Estonia's Records

The Netherlands' Open Government Act (Woo), which took effect in 2022, created a legal duty for public bodies to proactively publish far more of the documents they release under freedom-of-information requests, but there was no central way to find them, so the University of Amsterdam built Woogle, a free search engine that centralises Woo/Wob disclosures.

Woogle set out to make more than three million scanned Dutch freedom-of-information dossiers searchable despite redactions, inconsistent labelling by releasing bodies, and bundled scans, and to test whether the same design could work beyond the Dutch context.

The pipeline applies optical character recognition to redacted documents, Page Stream Segmentation to reconstruct original document boundaries from bundled scans, and automated metadata extraction and classification to compensate for inconsistent labelling; in May 2025 this work was formalised into the ICAI OpenGov Lab, a joint research lab between the University of Amsterdam and the Dutch government's Information Management organisation (RvIHH), led by Dr. Maarten Marx and Dr. Jaap Kamps with Dr. David Graus as lab manager, extending the tooling with large-language-model and retrieval-augmented-generation research.

Peer-reviewed documentation in the journal Data (MDPI) puts Woogle's holdings at more than three million FOIA dossiers, presented as over eleven million standardised pages, sourced from more than 1,000 distinct Dutch public bodies, and the same study reports that nearly 10,000 Estonian documents were successfully uploaded into the platform despite Estonia's ASiC-E and BDOC digital-signature formats and inconsistent, generic document titles creating real friction.

The published transfer test to Estonia is direct evidence that Woogle's approach is not purely a Dutch-language, Dutch-schema tool, though the Estonian extension remains a research-stage pilot of under 10,000 documents compared with the fully operational Dutch system, and no measurement of downstream citizen or journalist usage outcomes has yet been published.