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

[Bob Wyman]

Try this:

1. Assign Unique URI's that identify each member of the Texas State
Legislature. Strongly consider using URNs that are similar in form to
those defined by NewsML.
See: (http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3085.txt) each member would get
something like:
	urn:psi:rdfweb.org:20040212:txleg.Smith.Peter:1

2. Create some RDF that declares the mapping of URNs to names.

3. Publish your list of mappings so that other people can know about
your URI's.

4. Ask people who have any information about any of these members to
insert RDF into their blogs. The RDF statements should be "about" the
URNs you defined. Encourage everyone who does this to "ping"
PubSub.com at "http://xping.pubsub.com/ping" using the
"weblogUpdates.extendedPing" method defined by blo.gs at:
http://blo.gs/ping.php#details . (Note: This is preferred to the
"weblogUpdates.ping" method defined by weblogs.com since the
extendedPing identifies the RSS file associated with the blog.)

5. Subscribe to receive all blog entries which reference these URNs by
using the advanced form at PubSub.com:
http://weblogs.pubsub.com/advanced . Given the URN scheme above, you
want to subscribe to "Referenced URI's" which contain
"urn:psi:rdfweb.org:20040212:txleg" (it's basically a wild card...)

6. Build an RDF processor that regularly checks the custom RSS file
that we will create for you. This processor should pull from the file
all new items, extract the RDF from them and update your knowledge
base about the legislators.

7. Sit back and watch the data roll in...

8. After relaxing a bit, do the same for other legislatures.

9. For extra points, eliminate the polling and use of the RSS delivery
mechanism by asking us to push new data to you the moment it arrives.
To do this, you would use the PubSub REST interface which is defined
at: http://www.pubsub.com/REST/ .

This basic pattern can be used to build a broad variety of what will
be, I think, *very* exciting RDF based applications. Your application
could sit there quietly "accreting" information about the various
legislators without much effort on your part, once you've got it set
up.

Is this cool?

		bob wyman


-----Original Message-----
From: rdfweb-dev-bounces at vapours.rdfweb.org
[mailto:rdfweb-dev-bounces at vapours.rdfweb.org] On Behalf Of Sean
McCullough
Sent: Thursday, February 12, 2004 6:56 PM
To: rdfweb-dev at vapours.rdfweb.org
Subject: [rdfweb-dev] foaf'ing the Texas State Legislature 


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


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