1. Talk of Europe
Linked data of the European Parliament
CLICKNL Connected Data
Lab111
December 2, 2014
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Laura Hollink
Web and Media
Computer Science
VU University Amsterdam

2. LinkedPolitics: Linked Open Data of political
events, actors, media.

3. Talk of Europe
• Goal: publish the plenary debates
of the European Parliament as
Linked Data
• Linked Data: a format for
publishing data on the Web, with
URI’s as permanent identifiers,
designed for connecting pieces of
data.
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• Why is this important?
A. To allow large scale analysis
across time spans by social
scientists interested in voting
behavior, partisanship,
lobbies, differences between
countries, etc.
B. To residents of the European
Union, so the electorate,
access to the proceedings of
the European parliament is a
formal right.

4. Data

5. Data

6. Data
14M triples about the 30K speeches
by 3K speakers (and their affiliations)
in 1K session days that were held in
the EU parliament so far (1999-2014)

7. Links to external datasets
Country names
Members of Parliament
Members of Parliament
+ Parties Members of
Parliament

8. Searching the proceedings of the EU Parliament
"Greece" in the plenary meetings of the European Parliament
Year
Nr.ofmentions
050100150200
1999 2000 2001 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2010 2011 2012 2013

9. Searching the proceedings of the EU Parliament
"Slovenia" in the plenary meetings of the European Parliament
Year
Nr.ofmentions
020406080100
1999 2000 2001 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2010 2011 2012 2013

10. Searching the proceedings of the EU Parliament
"Slovenia" in the plenary meetings of the European Parliament
Year
Nr.ofmentions
020406080100
1999 2000 2001 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2010 2011 2012 2013

11. Example queries on the Talk-of-Europe data
• What are differences between members in terms of topics mentioned?
• What are differences between EU parties in terms of topics mentioned?
• Which new member was discussed most when they joined?
• For each EU country, get the number of speeches held by its representatives
that contains the word “agriculture".
• …

12. Access to the data
1. We provide access in three ways:
2. Through a SPARQL endpoint at http://linkedpolitics.ops.few.vu.nl/sparql/
3. Using the browse and search options of ClioPatria.
4. By downloading the data in turtle or RDF/XML.
5. As triple patterns fragments at http://data.linkeddatafragments.org/
linkedpolitics (Thanks to Ruben Verborgh).

13. Creative Camps
• 3 events of one week each,
where people are invited to
work with our data on-sight.
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• Outcome CC 1 @ Hilversum:
• Links to the Italian
parliament.
• Detection of people who
speak about an unusual
mix of topics.
• Sentiment analysis

14. Creative Camps
• 3 events of one week each,
where people are invited to
work with our data on-sight.
!
• Outcome CC 1 @ Hilversum:
• Links to the Italian
parliament.
• Detection of people who
speak about an unusual
mix of topics.
• Sentiment analysis

15. Creative Camps
• 3 events of one week each,
where people are invited to
work with our data on-sight.
!
• Outcome CC 1 @ Hilversum:
• Links to the Italian
parliament.
• Detection of people who
speak about an unusual
mix of topics.
• Sentiment analysis
Register for our mailinglist if you want to be
informed about the next call for participation!
http://www.talkofeurope.eu/contact/

16. Credits
Funded by
Martijn Kleppe
Max Kemman
Jill Briggeman
Henri Beunders
Astrid van Aggelen
Laura Hollink
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Johan Oomen
Jaap Blom
Victor de Boer