The documentary series “Risposte” (Archivio di Stato di Venezia) forms an almost continuous collection of advisory opinions drafted by the Cinque Savi alla Mercanzia for the Venetian Senate (1540-1733). The paper presents a pilot study that treats the “Risposte” as structured units of policy reasoning that can be modelled and analysed at scale. Focusing on register 142 (1607-1610), for which complete digitizations and a subset of manual diplomatic transcriptions are available, we define the single “Risposta” as the primary decision unit and design a two-layer data model: a minimal documentary core plus an analytical layer with controlled vocabularies (policy domain, decision orientation, triggers, actors, geography). Institutional variants are encoded as explicit relations rather than treated as exceptions. To support scalability, we evaluate an ATR/HTR workflow and we prototype lightweight NLP procedures (deontic formula extraction, monetary expressions, similarity measures) for semi-automatic population and quality control. The pilot operationalises two directions of scalability: a stable decision-unit model and an interoperable transcription pipeline to populate it, enabling future large-scale analysis of institutional coherence, policy drift, and risk management in early modern Venice.