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

[Zach Beauvais]

Hi Peio,

The UK Government has worked a lot on organising and publishing data 
in semantic ways, including using RDF and a series of ontologies, so that
might be a good place to start. For example, the payments ontology [1] 
is introduced as:

> There is ongoing work within both local and central government on publication of data on payments to suppliers. Initially such data is generally being published as raw spreadsheets but there is a desire to move towards publication using open web standards that facilitate combination and comparison of data. Such linked data (http://linkeddata.org/) approaches can offer a number of benefits which complement publication in raw spreadsheet form. 

It might be a good place to start; and there is more specifically on Linked Data in the UK government too [2] There has also been a lot of work around public transparency via the IATI, which uses my employer's project to publish information on aid spending [3] as Linked Data, using their own ontology [4] and skos [5] (Simple Knowledge Organisation System) for structuring their data too. 

I hope that's helpful. 

-Z 

[1] http://data.gov.uk/resources/payments 
[2] http://data.gov.uk/linked-data
[3] http://kasabi.com/dataset/iati
[4] http://www.iatistandard.org/ontology#
[5] http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#

On Wed, Feb 15, 2012 at 6:11 AM, Peio Popov <peio at peio.org (mailto: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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-- 
-- 
Zach Beauvais | @zbeauvais (http://www.twitter.com/zbeauvais)
www.zachbeauvais.com (http://www.zachbeauvais.com)
z.beauvais at gmail.com (mailto:z.beauvais at gmail.com)
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