RE: Ontology design for UK Parliament

Hi all,
Sharing the situational awareness over what the parliament is doing is a key factor in improving democracy in the digital age. Congratulations to the UK parliament are in place for taking this step.
Helsinki, Turku and others have some implementations with some municipality boards as well as the Finnish Parliament. These partly take into account AS2, JSON-LD and Popolo. There is a national standard in testing, and we would be keen to support any work that would bring us closer to an international one.

Cheers,Jaakko+358503285285

> Date: Fri, 26 Aug 2016 17:31:35 +0100
> From: michaeljsmethurst@gmail.com
> To: jamespetermckinney@gmail.com; raphael.troncy@eurecom.fr
> CC: public-opengov@w3.org
> Subject: Re: Ontology design for UK Parliament
> 
> Hello
> 
> On 25/08/2016, 17:04, "James McKinney" <jamespetermckinney@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> >Hi all,
> >
> >I’m supportive of any work to align vocabularies and formats across legislatures.
> 
> Super ☺
> >
> >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.
> 
> And probably more applicable to being mapped into schema.org extensions…?
> 
> >
> >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.
> 
> There does seem to be a split between models for document drafting and outputs and models for the processes that sit behind the drafting. As far as I’m aware John’s project is more about drafting documents as they evolve through amendment whereas our domain model is more about the processes happening that inform, raise, debate and vote on the amendments. And the committees that form and the evidence they here and the reports they produce etc. The drafting work and the domain model obviously intersect though I can’t say we’re too sure where or how. But are due a meeting soon
> >
> >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.
> 
> Quite a lot of the user groups / use cases we have for the parliament website / data are from specialist users (journalists, lawyers, charities, lobby groups etc) as well as wider civil society so we do need a way to model some of the more gnarly internal processes in a public way. But how many of those might map to other jurisdictions is very unclear
> >
> >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.
> 
> Yes, again capturing the right levels of abstraction and allowing for more specific implementations feels the right direction for now. We’ll hopefully have the beginnings of a UK implementation to show over the next couple of months (though parliamentary time is relative). Then start the conversation about how much can be usefully abstracted up for different parliament to implement differently
> 
> michael
> >
> >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
> >> Tel: +33 (0)4 - 9300 8242
> >> Fax: +33 (0)4 - 9000 8200
> >> Web: http://www.eurecom.fr/~troncy/

> >> 
> >
> 
> 
>