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

Wed Feb 15 13:56:34 UTC 2012

Thank you very much for your replies!  I will do my reading  and will
let you know if there is something to brag about :)

Some notes to the replies above:

@ Alex
ACE/APE definitely look like cool concepts, but currently I have a
good triple store available (OWLIM) and a part of the idea is to learn
more about it.

@ Sören
This looks very much like what I would like to achieve and I may use
it as an example, but more humane interface somehow.

@  Zach
Very useful links, thank you very much! Especially the payment
ontology is something that I needed at a very practical level!

@ Friedrich
It is rather soothing that it is not just me who finds these
technologies not, well, intuitive. But once I've seen the connections
and the inference possibilities - i decided I should at least try it.

Thank you once again!

Peio Popov

On Wed, Feb 15, 2012 at 15:04, Friedrich Lindenberg
<friedrich.lindenberg at okfn.org> wrote:
> 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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