Publishing Linked Data from Brazilian Politicians on the Web

Lucas de Ramos AraújoPablo N. Mendes

Jairo Francisco de Souza

At the Workshop on Semantics in Governance and Policy Modelling, Extended Semantic Web Conference 2011 ESWC2010.

May 30, 2011 - Crete, Greece

Outline● Introduction● Background● Project Landscape● Linking Citizens and Politicians● Conclusion

Introduction: Motivation● Why?

● Brazil has a substantial amount of government data available on the Web, but usually not structured

● Brazil ranks 61st in the United Nations E-Government Survey 2010 losing 16 positions since 2008 [1].

● Brazilian citizens: over 90% of the interviewed have average, little or no interest in politics [2].

● Mix information from different sources enable new services and offer new insights about the people and the government.

[1] United Nations e-Government Survey 2010 (http://unpan1.un.org/intradoc/groups/public/documents/un /unpan038851.pdf)[2] Latin American Public Opinion (http://www.scielo.br/pdf/op/v15n2/09.pdf)

Introduction: Goal● Our goal?

● Collect data from Brazilian politicians from different sources and publish them as Linked Open Data.

● Enable reuse and interconnection between information from different sources, thus generating new knowledge.

● Engage citizens in actively participating in the decisions being taken by their elected government.

● Bridging a gap between the government and public opinion.

Background● Linked Open Data, incrementally:

★★

★★ ★★

★★★★★★ ★★★★★★★★

★★★★★★★★★★

make your stuff available on the Web under an open license

make it available as structured data

use non-proprietary formats

use URIs to identify things, so that people can point at your stuff

link your data to other data to provide context

Tim Berners-Lee's 5 star scheme. http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html

6

WEB

< Approach: Integrate in-house, expose result of integration

PortalBD

BD

BD

IntegratedData

Consumer

Another Consumer

Data on the Web (1990s)

● One cannot anticipate all uses of his/her data– For some, a portal is a nice way to access data– For others, it is an obstacle on their way to create

interesting applications

7

< Linked Data Approach: expose individual data, expose linkage

LINKED DATA WEB

IntegratedData

Portal

AnotherMashup

Another Consumer

ConsumerBD

BD

BD

Data on the Web (linked!)

● A portal is just one option to look at the data.– Third parties have the freedom to re-purpose the data– Third-party perspectives may be useful for other people– May be useful even for the publisher's portal!

Project Architecture

DataSources

ScreenScrapers

Database

RDF

HTML

LOD Cloud

Supreme Electoral Court

Federal Senate

House of Representatives

Brazilian Politicians

Excellencies

Example page: Politician

Example Structured Data: Politician

Linked!

Politician

State

Proposals

Leaderships

Speechs

DBpedia

Twitter Mentions

UMBELYAGO

Missions Elections

AssetsVotes

GeoNames

Citizen Participation

Dataset

LOD Cloud

FacebookComments

Linking Citizens and Politicians● My city page:

● Emphasizing the interpretation that politicians represent a certain group of citizens

Visualization Perspectives● What is my elected representative working on?

● Start from keywords, dig into the text

Visualization Perspectives

● Offering interfaces for different visualizations.

Flexibility in Exploration● Arbitrary queries on the data

● Representatives of states with high illiteracy that vote on propositions related to 'education'

SELECT DISTINCT ?politico ?estado ?analfabetismo WHERE { ?politico a dbpedia-owl:Politician . ?politico dbpedia-owl:birthPlace ?estado . ?estado dbpprop:analfabetismo ?analfabetismo . ?estado dbpprop:nome ?nome . ?voto <http://ligadonospoliticos.com.br/politicobr/politician> ?politician . ?voto <http://ligadonospoliticos.com.br/politicobr/voting> ?votacao . ?votacao <http://ligadonospoliticos.com.br/politicobr/proposition> ?proposicao . ?proposicao rdf:type polbr:proposicao. ?proposicao dcterms:description ?ementa FILTER (?analfabetismo > 20) FILTER regex(?ementa, "educação","i")}

http://pt.dbpedia.org/?q=exemplos

Linking Citizens and Politicians● Connecting politicians to public opinion through

social media.

Conclusion● Following best practices (such as LOD) to open data

allows citizen developers to create interesting apps● We hope that more data and more applications will

engage citizens in an active dialog with the government

● As future work, we intend to:● Update and link more data.● Provide a friendly interface for query formulation ● Link propositions to LOD via entity extraction● Engage more developers

References● UNITED NATIONS. “United Nations E-Government Survey 2010”. New Yourk: UN

Publishing Section, 2010, “http://unpan1.un.org/intradoc/groups/public/documents/un /unpan038851.pdf”, December 2010.

● Opinião Pública.: Vol. 15, no 2, November, 2009, Encarte Tendências, Campinas, Brazil. p.511-542. Latin American Public Opinion (LAPOP). 2007. http://www.scielo.br/pdf/op/v15n2/09.pdf. March, 2011.