Forgiveness, not permission: Retro–fitting the Semantic Web onto British Democracy

Writing about web page http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/et2005/view/e_sess/5947

Stefan Magdalinsky

• hansard went online about 1997
• it's website is utterly utterly lame
• TheyWorkForYou.com are trying to fix some of this by grabbing the output of hasard and re-purposing it
• They parse hansard text and create hyperlinks – e.g. to people, wikipedia, a user-defined glossary
• exposes RSS for everything to allow other people to build on top of it
• supports email alerting for all kinds of events
• generates voting records for each MP
• link in the register of interest for each MP


• In theory parliamentary copyright doesn't allow reuse that may bring parliament into disrepute – but in practice they backed off from issuing a cease & desist about unmoderated comments


• runs on LAMP (except with F-BSD).
• Input files are very dirty HTML with no semantic markup
• parse process works by maintaining a set of diff patches against each day's record to clean up textual errors
• gathering the stats picks up errors in hansard that would otherwise go uncorrected

Chris May : 17 Mar 2005 00:53 |  Tags: Etech |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem