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Semanitic Keyword-based Search on Structured Data Sources

IKC 2017: Semantic Keyword-Based Search on Structured Data Sources pp 32–43Cite as

Analysing and Visualising Parliamentary Questions: A Linked Data Approach

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 10546))

Abstract

In many national parliaments, Members can exercise a basic Parliamentary function of holding the Executive to account by submitting Questions to Government Ministers. In certain parliaments, Members also have the faculty of either requesting a written answer or an oral one. Parliamentary Questions (PQs) often generate significant media attention and public interest, and are considered to be a very useful tool for parliamentarians to scrutinise the Government’s operative and financial administration. Interesting insights about individual Members of Parliament (MPs) as well as about the Parliament as a collective institution can be gleaned by analysing PQs. In this paper we present a linked data approach to PQs that is complemented with visualisations intended to increase the accessibility, by citizens, to this rich repository of parliamentary data. We use PQ data from the Maltese Parliament ranging over the last four legislatures and present an application called PQViz that exploits graph analytics to expose interesting insights from this data.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://pq.gov.mt/.

  2. 2.

    https://parlament.opendatamalta.com/pqs_V2/.

  3. 3.

    http://data.gov.uk.

  4. 4.

    http://www.appsfordemocracy.org/.

  5. 5.

    http://www.showusabetterway.co.uk/.

  6. 6.

    http://index.okfn.org.

  7. 7.

    https://mita.gov.mt/en/nationaldatastrategy/Documents/Data-DrivenPublicAdministration(Malta).pdf.

  8. 8.

    http://www.parliament.uk/site-information/copyright/open-parliament-licence/.

  9. 9.

    https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html.

  10. 10.

    http://linda-project.eu/.

  11. 11.

    Cabinet includes the Prim Minister and Ministers.

  12. 12.

    A copy of the PQs asked during the sitting held on 8th March 2017 is found here: http://parlament.mt/sittingdetails?sid=5764&l=1&legcat=13&forcat=12.

  13. 13.

    https://www.mongodb.com/.

  14. 14.

    http://rdf-translator.appspot.com/.

  15. 15.

    https://jena.apache.org/.

  16. 16.

    https://d3js.org/.

  17. 17.

    We will soon be considering the 13th legislature which has just started.

  18. 18.

    http://mlrs.research.um.edu.mt/.

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Acknowledgments

This work is part of the apps4Parliament project and is being done in collaboration with the Office of the Speaker (Parliament of Malta) and co-funded by the Malta Information Technology Agency (MITA).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Artificial Intelligence, University of Malta, Msida, Malta

    Charlie Abela & Joel Azzopardi

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  1. Charlie Abela
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  2. Joel Azzopardi
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Correspondence to Charlie Abela .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Gdańsk University of Technology, Gdańsk, Poland

    Julian Szymański

  2. Università degli Studi di Trento, Trento, Italy

    Yannis Velegrakis

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Abela, C., Azzopardi, J. (2018). Analysing and Visualising Parliamentary Questions: A Linked Data Approach. In: Szymański, J., Velegrakis, Y. (eds) Semantic Keyword-Based Search on Structured Data Sources. IKC 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10546. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74497-1_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74497-1_4

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