[okfn-discuss] call for proposals: Linking Government Data @ Talk of Europe Creative Camp #3

Fri Jun 26 19:15:02 UTC 2015

Call for proposals: The 3rd Talk-of-Europe Creative Camp on "Linking Government Data"

In this week-long event we will work on connecting datasets from and about governments, ranging from parliamentary proceedings and policy documents to news media and social media, and work towards a broad, international, cross-media network of 'Linked Government' data.

Deadline for Proposals: August 15, 2015
Creative Camp: October 26-30, 2015.
Location: Koninklijke Bibliotheek / National Library of the Netherlands, The Hague, NL.
Grants are available for travel costs and accommodation of participants with accepted proposals.

#### Goals and Topics ####
More and more data from and about governments is available online. To name just a few: parliamentary proceedings [e.g. 1, 2, 3], public financial information [4], news archives [5, 6], social media [7] and thesauri related to these subjects [8]. Some of these are Open Data and some are Linked Open Data. However, very few of these datasets are connected to each other. With this Creative Camp we aim to contribute to a Web of Data in which these diverse but related datasets are connected. We therefore invite researchers from various backgrounds to write a proposal for the creation of links between two or more sources of data and come to the third Talk of Europe Creative Camp to carry out their plans and to collaborate with researchers with similar or complementary research agendas. In addition to a description of the datasets and linking method, proposals should include the purpose of the links: what new research questions can be answered using the linked data? What new analyses can be done, or what new tools can be built?

Last year, the Talk of Europe project has released a Linked Open Data version of the plenary sessions of the European Parliament [1]. We are of course interested in links to this dataset, but we would like to stress that we accept proposals related to the broad domain of politics, policy and government at any level. The only prerequisite is that proposals result in data that can be made available as Linked Open Data.

We welcome proposals involving all topics that contribute to a Web of 'Linked Government' data in some way, including:
-information extraction, event extraction
-named entity detection and entity linking
-topic detection
-linking datasets across different languages
-ontology alignment
-data models and knowledge representation, e.g. of events or of links

#### Submission Details ####
This will be the final event in a series of three Creative Camps. The participants of previous Creative Camps are welcome to apply again. Talk of Europe will arrange a hotel for all participants and reimburse a return ticket to The Hague. Multiple participants per proposal are allowed, and even encouraged, but we might have to limit the number of people we fund per proposal. Preference will be given to participants from countries that are a member of CLARIN ERIC [9]. We ask all participants to make sure they can stay for the complete duration of the event.

Proposals should be no longer than 700 words and should describe the following:
* A description of the datasets that you plan to link, including a summary of their content, size, ownership and license (if applicable), if possible with a URL.
* A description of the linking approach.
* A description of the envisioned use of the links, e.g. research questions, analyses, tools using the combined datasets.
* The intended outcome of your participation including a description of how the result will be made available after the creative camp.
* Contact info and keywords describing the background of all participants who would like to attend and a confirmation the participants can attend the full week.

To submit a proposal, please send a pdf file to briggeman at eshcc.eur.nl before August 15, 2015. Notifications will be sent out by August 30, 2015. Accepted proposals will be made available on the talkofeurope.eu website.

#### About the Talk of Europe Project ####
The Talk of Europe – Travelling CLARIN Campus project aims to facilitate and stimulate pan-European collaboration in the Humanities, Social Sciences and Computer Science, based on the proceedings of the European Parliament (EP) by organising three international creative camps in 2014 and 2015. These proceedings are a rich source for humanities and social sciences researchers that focus on areas such as European History, integration and politics. Given their multilinguality they are also a rich source for linguists. The Talk of Europe (TOE) project team has made these proceedings available as Linked Open Data to stimulate research based on this data. The dataset contains the debates in the EP from July 1999 onwards, including all available translations in 22 languages. For information about the project and outcomes of the first and second creative camp, please visit our website at http://www.talkofeurope.eu/ . The data portal is online at http://www.purl.org/linkedpolitics.

We look forward to receiving your proposals! If you have any questions, do not hesitate to contact us at info at talkofeurope.eu.

On behalf of the Talk of Europe project team,

Astrid van Aggelen, VU University Amsterdam
Jill Briggeman, Erasmus University Amsterdam
Laura Hollink, Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI)
Martijn Kleppe, Erasmus University Amsterdam
Steven Krauwer, CLARIN ERIC
Linda Stokman, CLARIN ERIC

[1] www.purl.org/linkedpolitics (Linked Open Data)
[2] http://dati.camera.it/ (Linked Open Data)
[3] http://www.data.parliament.uk/dataset/12 (Open Data)
[4] http://linkedspending.aksw.org/ (Linked Open Data)
[5] The newspaper archive of the National Library of The Netherlands http://kranten.kb.nl/ (copyrights vary per document)
[6] http://gdeltproject.org/ (Open Data)
[7] e.g. the FSD Twitter Corpus described in Petrović et al. (2012) Using paraphrases for improving first story detection in news and Twitter. NAACL HLT'12, Stroudsburg, PA, USA, 338-346.
[8] http://data.nytimes.com/ (Linked Open Data)
[9] http://clarin.eu/content/about-eric
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Laura Hollink
Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica