Data

Talk of Europe is happy to announce the release of a new linked dataset: the proceedings of the plenary debates of the European Parliament as Linked Open Data.

The dataset covers all plenary debates held in the European Parliament (EP) between July 1999 and January 2014, and biographical information about the members of parliament. It includes: the monthly sessions of the EP, the agenda of debates, the spoken words and translations thereof in 21 languages; the speakers, their role and the country they represent; membership of national parties, European parties and commissions. The data is available through a SPARQL endpoint, see http://linkedpolitics.ops.few.vu.nl/ for more details.

Please note that this is a first version; we hope you will try it out and send us your feedback!

Context

To obtain data on the plenary debates, we generated RDF from the HTML pages published on the official website of the EP. We collaborated with the Political Mashup project, who provided scripts to scrape the HTML pages. The bibliographical data about members of parliament comes from the Automated Database of the European Parliament by Bjørn Høyland of the University of Oslo [1]. We translated this database to RDF, linked it to the debate data, and made it available as Linked Data as part of the Talk of Europe dataset.

Access to the data

We provide access in four ways:

We use a CC BY 4.0 license. To acknowledge us, please cite us as:
A.E. van Aggelen, L. Hollink. Plenary debates of the European Parliament as Linked Open Data. http://www.talkofeurope.eu/data/. Website accessed on [fill in date].

References

[1] Bjørn Høyland, Indraneel Sircar, Simon Hix. An Automated Database of the European Parliament. European Union Politics, 2009, Vol 10, Issue 1, 143 — 152.