Problem & Constraints
Municipal legislative records in rural Philippine local government units are stored in physical paper binders or fragmented scanned PDFs. Citizens and municipal staff have no fast way to search enacted ordinances on mobile devices.
How It's Built
1. Full-Text Legislative Indexing
Builds an inverted index of enacted municipal ordinances, resolutions, and committee reports using SQLite FTS5 for sub-second keyword matching.
Trade-off:SQLite FTS5 runs on low-cost server hardware without requiring heavy Elasticsearch clusters.
2. Offline PWA Service Worker
Caches recent gazette listings and legislative metadata on the user device via Workbox, allowing citizens to read ordinances even with weak provincial mobile signals.
Hurdles & Solutions
OCR Inaccuracies on Scanned Legacy Ordinances
Problem:Decades-old typewriter municipal documents had skewed text and faded ink that broke text search indexing.
Resolution:Pre-processed document scans with contrast normalization filters before passing text blocks into the search index.
Results & Numbers
Delivered sub-second search indexing across hundreds of local ordinances, giving citizens searchable mobile access to municipal legislation.