Plenary debates of the European Parliament as Linked Open Data

The LinkedEP dataset

The Talk of Europe project curates Linked Open Data about the European Parliament (EP). The dataset covers all plenary debates held in the EP between July 1999 and July 2017, and biographical information about the members of parliament. The dataset includes: information on the monthly sessions of the EP, the agenda of debates, the spoken words and translations thereof in 23 languages; the speakers, their role and the country they represent; membership of national parties, European parties and commissions.

Links

LinkedEP contains links to GeoNames, DBpedia and the official RDF database of the Italian parliament. The European Union Data Portal provides links between Member of Parliament instances in LinkedEP and their named entity resource JRC-Names, available through their SPARQL endpoint.

Enrichments

In the second Talk of Europe Creative Camp, Adam Funk and Wim Peters (University of Sheffield) used their in-house text engineering infrastructure GATE to annotate the speeches with the concepts in them and their degree of occurrence across the proceedings. They also interconnected these concepts based on their semantic relationship. The resulting RDF (n-triples) is available for download here.

Origin of the data

To obtain data about the plenary debates, we generated RDF from the HTML pages published on the official website of the EP. We collaborated with the Political Mashup project by Maarten Marx at the University of Amsterdam, who provided scripts to scrape the HTML pages.

The biographical data about members of parliament come from the Automated Database of the European Parliament of the University of Oslo [Høyland et al., 2009]. We translated this database to RDF, linked it to the debate data, and made it available as Linked Data as part of the LinkedEP dataset.

Access to the data

1. Through HTTP-resolvable URIs, see void:exampleResource for some typical example entry points.
2. For full-text search through the entire LinkedEP dataset, a search box is provided in the upper right corner of this page.
3. Through a SPARQL endpoint at http://linkedpolitics.ops.few.vu.nl/sparql/
4. Using the browse and search options of ClioPatria. ClioPatria is the semantic web server that we use to publish our data. The displayed menu bar at the top of the query page is the ClioPatria interface. To browse the graphs, go to the Graphs option under the Places tab; to query, go to the Query tab and choose your preferred SPARQL query interface.
5. By downloading the data in turtle (2.5Gb, gzipped tar file).

The concepts of 'Linked Dataset' and 'named graph' are registered in the CLARIN Component Registry . The CMDI file describing these resources can be found here.

Data model

The schema of classes and properties used in the LinkedEP dataset is displayed in the figure below. For a description see here.

Example queries

Example query 1:

SELECT ?date ?speechnr ?text 
WHERE { 
   ?sessionday rdf:type lpv_eu:SessionDay .
   ?sessionday dcterms:date ?date.	
   ?sessionday dcterms:hasPart ?agendaitem.
   ?agendaitem dcterms:hasPart ?speech.
  
   ?speech lpv:docno ?speechnr.
   ?speech lpv:spokenText ?text.
   FILTER ( ?date >= "2009-05-06"^^xsd:date && ?date <= "2010-05-06"^^xsd:date ) 
   FILTER(langMatches(lang(?text), "en"))
  
  } ORDER BY ?date ?speechnr LIMIT 100

Example query 2:

SELECT ?partyname (COUNT(DISTINCT ?speech) AS ?speechno)
WHERE {
   <http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2010-12-16_AgendaItem_4> dcterms:hasPart ?speech.
   ?speech lpv:spokenAs ?function.
   ?function lpv:institution ?party.
   ?party rdf:type lpv:EUParty.
   ?party lpv:acronym ?partyname.
} GROUP BY ?partyname

Example query 3:

SELECT (COUNT (DISTINCT ?ai) as ?count)
WHERE {
   ?ai rdf:type .
   ?ai dcterms:hasPart ?speech.
   ?speech lpv:speaker ?speaker.
   ?speaker lpv:countryOfRepresentation ?country.
   ?country rdfs:label ?label.
   filter(?label="France"@en)
}

Example query 4:

SELECT ?speech ?text
WHERE {
   ?speech tpf:match (lpv:text 'agriculture' ?text)
} LIMIT 10

Example query 5:

SELECT DISTINCT ?language (COUNT(DISTINCT ?speech) AS ?speechno)
WHERE {
   ?speech dcterms:language ?language .
   ?speech a lpv_eu:Speech .
} GROUP BY ?language

Example query 6:

SELECT ?date ?agendaItem
WHERE {
  ?concept skos:prefLabel "Syria"@en .
  ?annot dcterms:subject ?concept .
  ?agendaItem lpv:topicAnnotation ?annot .
  ?agendaItem dcterms:date ?date .
} ORDER BY DESC(?date)

License & citations

• Astrid van Aggelen, Laura Hollink, Max Kemman, Martijn Kleppe, Henri Beunders. The debates of the European Parliament as Linked Open Data. Semantic Web 8(2), pp. 271-281, 2017, IOS Press. for the project, data models and data creation methods, or
• Laura Hollink, Astrid van Aggelen, Henri Beunders, Martijn Kleppe, Max Kemman, Jacco van Ossenbruggen (2017). Talk of Europe - The debates of the European Parliament as Linked Open Data. DANS. https://doi.org/10.17026/dans-x62-ew3m.
for the dataset permanently stored at DANS.

References

Bjørn Høyland, Indraneel Sircar, Simon Hix. An Automated Database of the European Parliament. European Union Politics, 2009, Vol 10, Issue 1, 143 -- 152.