[open-government] Multilingual thesaurus for parliamentary data using SKOS

Sun Nov 30 17:18:23 UTC 2014

Dear all,

I recently started to prepare a rudimentary multilingual thesaurus for
parliamentary data using SKOS.

Example terms are "city council", "committee", "finance committee",
"subcommittee", "mayor | mayoress", councillor", "chairman | chairwoman"
(and/or "chairperson"), "alderman | alderwoman" (and/or "alderperson"),
"parliamentary caucus", "political party", "motion", "bill", "amendment"
etc.

At the moment I am mostly interested in English and German terms. But
other languages also would be most welcome.

The quality of the terms is more important than a large number of them.

The thesaurus will be implemented using the Simple Knowledge
Organization System (SKOS)[1].

Elementary relations between terms (eg "finance committee" is a narrower
term than "committee") will also be encoded.

The intention is to host the thesaurus below
"http://www.w3.org/ns/opengov" - pending an agreement with the W3C.

The thesaurus can then be used together with vocabularies such as Popolo
or OpenGovLD.

Let me know if you have questions or suggestions or would like to
contribute to this effort.

Please also let me know about similar initiatives I might not yet be
aware of (EuroVoc[2] unfortunately does not contain many of those terms
which are relevant for municipalities).

Cheers,
Andreas

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/skos-primer/

[2] http://eurovoc.europa.eu/