Building a Semantic Web for Politics

Hi all.

I run www.govtrack.us, which brings together information about the U.S. 
Congress and lets users track different types of events.  The goal of 
GovTrack is to make this public information more useful to people.

What I realized recently was that politics is a good topic for the 
semantic web.  There's a lot of scattered information about the 
government already online (GovTrack, vis.org, opensecrets.org, etc.), 
and it would all be a lot cooler if it was tied together in the semantic 
web.

So I started a few months ago tinkering with exporting all of GovTrack's 
data in RDF, creating ontologies as I needed them.  The 3 million 
triples are posted at
   http://www.govtrack.us/data/rdf/
and you can browse the data model at
   http://www.govtrack.us/rdfbrowse.xpd
and the schemas are posted at
   http://www.govtrack.us/share/vocabs.xpd

Comments and suggestions are more than welcome.

On the GovTrack mail list (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/govtrack/) 
there's the beginnings of a discussion about how to start sharing 
information related to the government (through RDF and/or other means). 
  If you're interested in this type of thing, I'd encourage you to join 
the list.

Also I've worked with a few others to create just last month 
www.ogdex.info, the Open Government Data Exchange, a wiki that will be a 
scratch pad for ideas about sharing structured information about the 
government.

I'm pretty new to RDF and the semantic web, and I'm hoping some of you 
with more experience than me will join some of these discussions to help 
us along.

Take care,

-- 
- Joshua Tauberer

http://taubz.for.net

** Nothing Unreal Exists **

Received on Sunday, 13 March 2005 02:42:02 UTC