[okfn-discuss] Semantic Technologies in the Open Spending / Open Economy fields

Wed Feb 15 13:04:31 UTC 2012

Hey Peio,

that sounds like an interesting project, please keep us updated as you
go along! In late 2010 I tried porting OpenSpending (then WDMMG) over
to RDF but couldn't make it work and decided the overhead was not
justified by the expected gains [1]. I still think that for very
fine-grained data (such as spending), you may be better off using an
RDBMS or CSV (although I am increasingly a fan of putting URIs in both
of those). What it gives you is ease of use, better aggregation and
query language etc.

On the other hand, I like the idea of putting more "meta" data like
actor profiles into a graph, although I've started doing a non-RDF
version even here: https://github.com/pudo/grano - maybe a bit
relevant?

Have fun!

- Friedrich

[1] http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/openspending/2010-November/000704.html

On Wed, Feb 15, 2012 at 7:11 AM, Peio Popov <peio at peio.org> wrote:
> Dear OKFN,
>  In the recent weeks I am playing and learning more about the general
> idea of applying Semantic Technologies to the public information about
> political funding and spending and the way it relates to the political
> activity.
>
> My general idea of a project is to RDF-fy and link the open data about the:
>
> 1. Political parties, their budget subsidies, donations, annual
> budgets, election campaign budgets and donations
> 2. MP's linked to the parties, their profile, parliamentary activity
> and annual tax declarations and
> 3. Public officials and other data - "somehow" linked to the political
> parties and the MPs
>
> If it sounds too broad and vague - it probably is. I am just reading
> and experimenting for the fun of it.
>
> What I would like to achieve as a result is something that will enable
> me to perform reasoning and inference based on the semantics of the
> data.
>
> This kind of tasks are usually assisted by the application of an
> ontology to the dataset so my first question is if you can recommend
> such ontology in the field that I would generally call Linked
> Political/Spending Data?
>
> I imagine further efforts in this direction would have to involve
> web/text mining and applying semantic annotations according to the
> conceptual models, so if you have any recommendations in this
> directions - please share.
>
> Does any of these questions sounds like something you already met?
>
> I will be grateful for any response and general comment that might
> help me in these wanders.
>
> Peio Popov
>
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