Finnish Parliament on the Semantic Web: Using ParliamentSampo Data Service and Semantic Portal for Studying Political Culture and Language

Abstract

<p>This paper introduces the system ParliamentSampo – Parliament of Finland on the Semantic Web, a Linked Open Data (LOD) service, data infrastructure, and semantic portal for studying Finnish political culture, language, and networks of the Members of Parliament (MP). The article presents the vision behind the system, the LOD service, and explores the possibilities to utilize it in research and application development. A knowledge graph of linked data has been created based on ca. 962 000 speeches in all plenary sessions of the Parliament of Finland in 1907—2021; the data is also available in XML format, utilizing the new international Parla-CLARIN format. For the first time, the entire time series of the Finnish parliamentary speeches has been converted into data and a data service in a unified format. In addition, the speeches have been interlinked with another knowledge graph created from the database of the MPs and enriched from other data sources into a broader ontology-based data service. The paper shows how the LOD service SPARQL endpoint can be used to research parliamentary culture, the use of political language, and networks of politicians through data analysis. The service endpoint can also be used to develop applications for different user groups without programming skills, such as the ParliamentSampo semantic portal introduced in the paper, too. This application aims to make political decision making more transparent to the general public, media, politicians, and other end users.<br></p>