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

[Peio Popov]

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