Hi Peio,

The UK Government has worked a lot on organising and publishing data 
in semantic ways, including using RDF and a series of ontologies, so that
might be a good place to start. For example, the payments ontology [1] 
is introduced as:

> There is ongoing work within both local and central government on publication 
> of data on payments to suppliers. Initially such data is generally being 
> published as raw spreadsheets but there is a desire to move towards 
> publication using open web standards that facilitate combination and 
> comparison of data. Such linked data (http://linkeddata.org/) approaches can 
> offer a number of benefits which complement publication in raw spreadsheet 
> form. 

It might be a good place to start; and there is more specifically on Linked 
Data in the UK government too [2] There has also been a lot of work around 
public transparency via the IATI, which uses my employer's project to publish 
information on aid spending [3] as Linked Data, using their own ontology [4] 
and skos [5] (Simple Knowledge Organisation System) for structuring their data 
too. 

I hope that's helpful. 

-Z 

[1] http://data.gov.uk/resources/payments 
[2] http://data.gov.uk/linked-data
[3] http://kasabi.com/dataset/iati
[4] http://www.iatistandard.org/ontology#
[5] http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#

On Wed, Feb 15, 2012 at 6:11 AM, Peio Popov <[email protected] 
(mailto:[email protected])> wrote:
> Dear OKFN,
>  In the recent weeks I am playing and learning more about the general
> idea of applying Semantic Technologies to the public information about
> political funding and spending and the way it relates to the political
> activity.
> 
> My general idea of a project is to RDF-fy and link the open data about the:
> 
> 1. Political parties, their budget subsidies, donations, annual
> budgets, election campaign budgets and donations
> 2. MP's linked to the parties, their profile, parliamentary activity
> and annual tax declarations and
> 3. Public officials and other data - "somehow" linked to the political
> parties and the MPs
> 
> If it sounds too broad and vague - it probably is. I am just reading
> and experimenting for the fun of it.
> 
> What I would like to achieve as a result is something that will enable
> me to perform reasoning and inference based on the semantics of the
> data.
> 
> This kind of tasks are usually assisted by the application of an
> ontology to the dataset so my first question is if you can recommend
> such ontology in the field that I would generally call Linked
> Political/Spending Data?
> 
> I imagine further efforts in this direction would have to involve
> web/text mining and applying semantic annotations according to the
> conceptual models, so if you have any recommendations in this
> directions - please share.
> 
> Does any of these questions sounds like something you already met?
> 
> I will be grateful for any response and general comment that might
> help me in these wanders.
> 
> Peio Popov
> 
> _______________________________________________
> okfn-discuss mailing list
> [email protected] (mailto:[email protected])
> http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/okfn-discuss



-- 
-- 
Zach Beauvais | @zbeauvais (http://www.twitter.com/zbeauvais)
www.zachbeauvais.com (http://www.zachbeauvais.com)
[email protected] (mailto:[email protected])
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