[rdfweb-dev] foaf'ing the Texas State Legislature

[Sean McCullough]

Hi all,

I'm working on a project to generate an RDF representation of
the current Texas State Legislature.  Towards this,
I've made a lot of progress by web scraping from
publicly available sites.  I've got senators, reps,
committee memberships, campaign contributions,
bill authorship and sponsorship, and committee
hearing testimony records all scattered throughout
several large XML files.  They're all different
schema, and I'm trying to consolidate using RDF.

I'm running into a couple of problems, naturally.

1. FOAF: None of these people have email addresses listed.
I'm considering using {firstName}.{surname}@capitol.state.tx.us
as a place-holder.  Is that kosher?

2. I'm scraping several other data sources in order
to build a richer data set, and this includes information
such as campaign contributions.  In RDF, I'd say something
like <myNS:OilCo> <mySchema:contributor> <myNS:MySenator>
but I want to capture quantitative information like
the ammount of the contribution as well.  Is there some
way to parameterize assertions in RDF, so that
in one statement I can say 
"OilCo contributed [$500k] to MySenator"?

Also, if anyone is already using RDF to
represent political entities like this, I would
like to avoid duplicating any existing work.  Please
let me know if you've seen or worked with something
similar.

If you're interested in developing tools
to collect and analyse this information I'm looking
for collaborators as well.

-Sean