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
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