Debates of the European Parliament as LOD

----- Dataset announcement -----

We are happy to announce the release of a new linked dataset: the proceedings of the plenary debates of the European Parliament as Linked Open Data.

The dataset covers all plenary debates held in the European Parliament (EP) between July 1999 and January 2014, and biographical information about the members of parliament. It includes: the monthly sessions of the EP, the agenda of debates, the spoken words and translations thereof in 21 languages; the speakers, their role and the country they represent; membership of national parties, European parties and commissions. The data is available though a SPARQL endpoint, see http://linkedpolitics.ops.few.vu.nl/ for more details.

Please note that this is a first version; we hope you will try it out and send us your feedback!

----- Access to the data -----
We provide access in three ways:
• Through a SPARQL endpoint at http://linkedpolitics.ops.few.vu.nl/sparql/
• Using the ClioPatria web interface at http://linkedpolitics.ops.few.vu.nl/
• By downloading data dumps. See http://linkedpolitics.ops.few.vu.nl/.

We use a CC BY 4.0 license. To acknowledge us, please cite us as: A.E. van Aggelen, L. Hollink. Plenary debates of the European Parliament as Linked Open Data. http://www.talkofeurope.eu/data/. Website accessed on [fill in date].

----- Origins the data -----
To generate data on the plenary debates, we generated RDF from the HTML pages published on the official website of the EP [2]. We collaborated with the Political Mashup project [3], who provided scripts to scrape the HTML pages. The bibliographical data about members of parliament comes from the Automated Database of the European Parliament by Bjørn Høyland of the University of Oslo [4]. We translated this database to RDF, linked it to the debate data, and made it available as Linked Data as part of the dataset.

----- Talk of Europe project -----
The data was created within the Talk of Europe<http://www.talkofeurope.eu> project [1]. To stimulate people to work with our data, we organise a series of Creative Camps with bursaries for participants. The next call for participation is expected to open in January 2015. We look forward to your proposals!

If you would like to keep informed about this dataset, the Talk of Europe project and the Creative Camps, please register for our mailinglist at http://www.talkofeurope.eu/contact/ .

Kind regards

Laura Hollink,
on behalf of the Talk of Europe project partners:
- Erasmus University Rotterdam / Erasmus Studio (Max Kemman, Martijn Kleppe, Henri Beunders)
- VU University Amsterdam (Astrid van Aggelen, Laura Hollink)
- The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision (Johan Oomen, Jaap Blom, Victor de Boer)
- DANS (Marnix van Berchum)

The Talk of Europe project is supported by CLARIN_NL, CLARIN-ERIC and NWO.

[1] http://talkofeurope.eu/
[2] http://europarl.europa.eu/
[3] http://politicalmashup.nl/
[4] http://folk.uio.no/bjornkho/MEP/

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Laura Hollink
Assistant Professor
Web and Media group
VU University Amsterdam
http://www.cs.vu.nl/~laurah/