opengovld / skos

Multilingual thesaurus for parliamentary data: SKOS Concepts and Concept Schemes

SKOS

SKOS Concepts and Concept Schemes

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 we are mostly active regarding English, French and German terms. But other languages also are most welcome. It is work in progress.

The quality of the terms and translations is more important than a large number of them.

The thesaurus will be implemented using the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS)(http://www.w3.org/TR/skos-primer/).

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 the namespace "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 us know if you have questions or suggestions or would like to contribute to this effort.

Please also let us know about similar initiatives we might not yet be aware of. EuroVoc (http://eurovoc.europa.eu/) unfortunately does not contain many of those terms which are relevant for municipalities.

skos's Issues

Add `skos:ConceptScheme`s

Organization types and categories

A basic list:

• committee
• parliamentary group (better than "faction", see comment below)
• party
• external committee
• institution

See OpenGovLD/specs#13 and OParl/spec#173 (comment)

Korean labels

Compile list of translation platforms

Two kinds of amendments

See [1] and [2]; this needs to be clarified in the scheme.

Meeting status

Meetings can have different status. See
OParl/spec#279 (comment) for examples.

A skos:ConceptScheme can be designed for them.

Terms from Canada

Some usefull terms from Canada hopefully will be defined here:
SpringtideCollectiveOrg/openhousens.ca#26

Evaluate YAGO

The YAGO knowledge base (http://www.mpi-inf.mpg.de/departments/databases-and-information-systems/research/yago-naga/yago/) perhaps contains needed terms - or it can be extended and become a replacement.

Add relations

Compile list of SKOS editor tools

Scoped concepts

It seems useful to apply [spatial] scope to some of these concepts, like Hauptausschuss, which I understand to be specific to Germany and Austria. Presumably, this would be done using skos:scopeNote.

Relate to Wikidata

Some terms have been developed at Wikipedia, and ensures good semantic reference in the form of Wikidata-ID. Some examples:

• "city council" https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q3154693
• "Committee on Finance" https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q5153053
• ...

PS: similar discussion here.