Re: Ontology design for UK Parliament

Hi all,

I’m supportive of any work to align vocabularies and formats across legislatures.

Popolo was designed with civil society as its primary audience, so it focuses on the publication/distribution of information. Within that use case, it’s easier to normalize terms across legislatures. Civil society’s interests tend to be much narrower than the universe of legislative activity, so that reduced scope also makes standardization easier.

On the other hand, within a legislature, there are many more use cases that can pull a vocabulary towards being more specific: for example, there may be a desire to satisfy internal use cases like drafting legislation, tracking changes, etc. My understanding is that, with the work John Sheridan did in the UK, it was necessary to get very specific in order to satisfy those use cases.

So, I anticipate that, with any new work, it will be possible to achieve alignment for the publication/distribution of information, but it may be difficult to produce a reusable vocabulary for internal use cases, which tend to be specific to each legislature.

I am just raising this potential issue, because I would like to ensure that whatever product comes out of this work would still allow the easy interpretation of information across different legislatures. My experience with Akoma Ntoso, for example, has been that it provides LEGO blocks that each legislature uses to build different documents, which can’t be easily parsed in the same way.

James


> On Aug 25, 2016, at 3:27 AM, Raphaël Troncy <raphael.troncy@eurecom.fr> wrote:
> 
> Dear all,
> 
>> I'm currently working for UK Parliament [1] and we're interested in designing a formal ontology for our procedural data. Initially for use in internal systems but also mapping to common vocabularies for publishing.
>> We'd like to do this in as open and collaborative a way as possible and we're wondering if this group would be a good place to do that?
> 
> It indeed seems that this is a favorable moment to progress on those issues since a number of parliaments in Europe and elsewhere are working on this. The Popolo project [1] has already been mentioned.
> In France, you may want to look at the work done with the OODF ontology [2]. In Europe, I believe that all the work around ELI (and ECLI) is relevant [3]. There is finally all the work done by Thomas Francart around the legislation extension to schema.org [4].
> 
>  Raphaël
> 
> [1] http://www.popoloproject.com/
> [2] http://openlaw.fr/index.php?title=Ontologie_Ouverte_du_Droit_Fran%C3%A7ais_(OODF)
> [3] http://publications.europa.eu/mdr/eli/
> [4] https://github.com/schemaorg/schemaorg/issues/1156
> 
> --
> Raphaël Troncy
> EURECOM, Campus SophiaTech
> Data Science Department
> 450 route des Chappes, 06410 Biot, France.
> e-mail: raphael.troncy@eurecom.fr & raphael.troncy@gmail.com
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> Web: http://www.eurecom.fr/~troncy/
>