Re: Multilingual thesaurus for parliamentary data using SKOS

Hi Andreas,

Where is the work-in-progress thesaurus hosted?

In terms of structure, I think it makes sense to scope the thesaurus to possible values for specific RDF terms, e.g.

http://www.w3.org/TR/vocab-org/#org:classification for “committee”, “caucus”, “political party”, etc.
http://www.w3.org/TR/vocab-org/#org:role for “mayor”, “councillor”, etc.
http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-terms/#terms-type for “bill”, “motion”, etc.

Otherwise, the scope is too broad and becomes a game of assigning a name to everything. Here are two examples of projects that try to “name all the things” without having clear use cases. Citizen Dan / MUNI ontology seems to take pride in having an ontology that, if printed, would cover "1200 square feet" [1] - which to me means it’s too big for anyone to use productively.

http://www.oegov.org/
http://vocab.muni-ontology.org/ (http://wiki.opensemanticframework.org/images/c/ca/Muni.owl)

Lots of governments have thesauri, which are often used for more than just parliamentary use cases but often include relevant terms:

http://reference.data.gov.uk/def/parliament
http://reference.data.gov.uk/def/central-government
http://standards.esd.org.uk/
http://www.thesaurus.gc.ca/
https://onki.fi/

In terms of “chair”, “chairperson”, “chairman”, “chairwoman” - that should all be the same term, using skos:prefLabel and skos:altLabel for the different forms. A lot of time can likely be lost agreeing on a prefLabel, so it may save time to just use altLabel for all terms.

1. http://www.citizen-dan.org/muni

Cheers,

James

On Nov 30, 2014, at 12:26 PM, Eunjeong Lucy Park <lucypark@popong.com> wrote:

> Dear Andreas,
> 
> Interesting project!
> In case you're also interested in Korean, here's a dictionary of terms maintained by Team POPONG in South Korea:
> https://github.com/teampopong/crawlers/blob/60f1c6fa87bf2d0fc246740d05b6171824092386/glossary/glossary.csv
> (And here's the web version of the same file: http://en.popong.com/glossary)
> 
> Regards,
> Lucy Park 
> 
> --
> 박은정 (Lucy Park) Data miner
> lucypark.kr / @echojuliett
> 
>    
> 
> On Mon, Dec 1, 2014 at 2:18 AM, Andreas Kuckartz <a.kuckartz@ping.de> wrote:
> 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/
> 
>