Plenary Debates of the Parliament of Finland as Linked Open Data and in Parla-CLARIN Markup

Abstract

This paper presents a knowledge graph created by transforming the plenary debates of the Parliament of Finland (1907–) into Linked Open Data (LOD). The data, totaling over 900 000 speeches, with automatically created semantic annotations and rich ontology-based metadata, are published in a Linked Open Data Service and are used via a SPARQL API and as data dumps. The speech data is part of larger LOD publication FinnParla that also includes prosopographical data about the politicians. The data is being used for studying parliamentary language and culture in Digital Humanities in several universities. To serve a wider variety of users, the entirety of this data was also produced using Parla-CLARIN markup. We present the first publication of all Finnish parliamentary debates as data. Technical novelties in our approach include the use of both Parla-CLARIN and an RDF schema developed for representing the speeches, integration of the data to a new Parliament of Finland Ontology for deeper data analyses, and enriching the data with a variety of external national and international data sources.