Supporting Self-Organization in Politics by the Semantic Web Technologies

SupportingSelf-

Organizationin Politics bythe Semantic

WebTechnologies

Vaclav Belakand Vojtech

Svatek

Introduction

OntopolisSchema

OntopolisPortal

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Supporting Self-Organization in Politics by theSemantic Web Technologies

Vaclav Belak1 and Vojtech Svatek2

1Digital Enterprise Research InstituteNational University of Ireland, Galway

2Department of Information and Knowledge EngineeringUniversity of Economics, Prague

ePart 2010, Lausanne

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Motivation

Widespread of social web have brought the newpossibilities of large-scale collaboration anddecentralization

Many bottom-up public initiatives emerge ingeneral-purpose sites like Facebook

It is hard to attract users to join a dedicatedeParticipation site

Any rather small/empty site is unattractive for usersTo rise the attractivity, the impact to the real policy isneededTo rise impact, the representativeness of user-base has tobe risen

A large portion of the public discourse is actually realizedoutside of specialized ePart systems

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Motivation

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Motivation

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Problem Statement

Given the heterogeneity of public discourse, how will theoverall overview of citizens’ opinions and knowledge beable to be determined?

How can be the ability of people to spontaneously formpublic initiatives improved in such settings?

Considering that many public issues are intrinsicallycomplex, how to avoid information overflow?

How will a user be able to determine what is worthy ofhis/her attention and what is not?

How will a government and other public stakeholdersrealize what is really demanded no matter what systemsare used by the participants?

How to avoid a possibility of abuse of data about politicalprofiles of people?

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Problem Statement

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Problem Statement

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Problem Statement

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Towards Solution

One silver-bullet solution seems unreasonable due to theregional, cultural, and legislative differences

The more appropriate way to rise an impact may be to linkexisting systems together

Users would then benefit from shared knowledgeUsers could even collaborate across systems’ boundaries

Ability to collaborate and problems with informationoverflow can be addressed by a better recommendation ofusers or content, respectively

The combination of social web and knowledge technologiesseems to be a natural step to tackle these issues

Our main aim has been to create a social-semantic webplatform enabling its users to collaboratively createsolutions of public issues and to self-organize around thesesolutions

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Towards Solution

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Towards Solution

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Outline

1 Core eParticipation ontology: Ontopolis Schema

2 Proof-of-concept social-semantic web portal: Ontopolis.net

3 Conclusion

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Initial Requirements

Ontology must not a priori conceive any particular publicissue nor organization

It has to be as flexible as possible

All data should be represented in RDF to bring flexibilityof interactions

Among users of different systemsAmong systems themselves

Ontology should be based on existing ones to allow reuseof already existing knowledge

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Competency Questions

The main purpose of this ontology can be characterized by thefollowing competency questions:

What are actual political issues that people areinterested in?

How are these issues interrelated?

What are possible solutions of these issues?

Which of these solutions are more worthy of attention?

Given one particular proposed solution of some issue, whatare similar solutions?

Who is interested in similar political topics as a given user?

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Ontopolis Ontology—OPOL

It plays a crucial role in the system:

all data are represented using OPOLdata are also validated using OPOLit enable to guarantee the freedom of data

OPOL re-uses several existing ontologies:

FOAF for representation of persons and their relationshipsSIOC for representation of content and its relationships tousersDOLCE for representation of public issues and goalsWordNet Basic for disambiguation of descriptions ofcontentDCTermsKonfidi

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Friend of a Friend

opol:MailBox

rdfs:Literal

opol:PEGroup

opol:PEUsergroup

OnlineAccount

accountName

Person

firstName surname

holdsAccount

member

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Semantically-Interlinked On-line Communities

foaf:OnlineAccount

has_function

opol:PEUsergroup

Usergroup

has_member

opol:AddPlanPermission

sioc_a:Permission

opol:DeletePlanPermission

opol:GroupAdmin

sioc_a:has_permissionsioc_a:has_permission

has_scope

has_creator

sioc_t:Tag

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Representation of Political Programs usingDOLCE I

We want to represent public issues and their proposedsolutions

Users can play different roles depending on their attitudetowards the problem:

They can create an issue and/or propose its solutionOr they can just express their sympathy towards somealready existing solution

Proposed solution of an issue is described by its goal(s)and its measure(s)

If some user express its goal to solve an issue, we want tounderstand this as a public promise, which another usermay express its trust to

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Representation of Political Programs usingDOLCE II

doledns:task

opol:Measure

opol:Support

opol:PoliticalRole

opol:support_of

opol:Supporter

doledns:role

dolplans:has-assignment

foaf:Agent

doledns:played-by

opol:PoliticalCandidate dolmd:promise

dolmd:commitment

doledns:d-uses

opol:Following

opol:PoliticalIssue

doledns:social-desctiption

doledns:goal

opol:is_solution_of

doledns:plan

doledns:defines

dolite:proper-part

opol:IssueSolutionPlan

dolplans:adopts-goal

dolplans:adopts-plan

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Representing Disambiguation

WordNet Basic schema vocabulary

Word sense disambiguation

wn20basic:Synset

xsd:nonNegativeInteger

wn20basic:synsetId

rdfs:Literal

wn20basic:senseLabel

xsd:string

sioc:Item

sioc_t:Tag

sioc:topic

dcterms:title

sioc:topic

dcterms:subjectrdf:subject

rdf:object

rdf:predicate

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Representing Similarity

similarity vocabulary similarity example

opol:SimilarityInfo

sioc:Item

dolite:proper-part

rdfs:Literal

opol:similarity

similarity#1

solution_plan#1

dolite:proper-part

solution_plan#2

dolite:proper-part

0.67777^^xsd:double

opol:similarity

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Global Architecture

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Key Technologies

Ontopolis.net is written using Grails framework

agile developmentJava platformintegrating state-of-the art Java components: Spring,Sitemesh, JUnit, . . .

Data are stored in Jena SDB RDF store with PostgreSQLat the back-end

Jena’s generic rules engine is used for real-time reasoning

Data are validated using Pellet reasoner and its IC plug-in

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Key Technologies

Ontopolis.net is written using Grails framework

agile developmentJava platformintegrating state-of-the art Java components: Spring,Sitemesh, JUnit, . . .

Data are stored in Jena SDB RDF store with PostgreSQLat the back-end

Jena’s generic rules engine is used for real-time reasoning

Data are validated using Pellet reasoner and its IC plug-in

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Usage Scenarios—Internal

Creating an issue

Suggest a solution of an issue—political candidate role

Declaring support to a candidate—political supporter role(follower)

Creating group

group administratoradding goals of the groupthree roles in the group:

plain memberfollowercandidate

the only way to share a plan

Recommendation of similar issues, users, and solutions

Overview of most trusted users, or the most pressing issues

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Creating an issue

Creating group

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Creating an issue

Creating group

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Usage Scenarios—Distributed

All the knowledge (RDF data) is possible to share by aSPARQL end-point

HTTP-based protocol and query language for theSemantic Web

Any third party can thus obtain from the system in amachine processable form any data in the same way as thesystem itself

list of issueslist of proposed solutionssocial network structurelist of users, . . .

In this distributed fashion, any other system will be able toprovide by far more knowledge about possible solutions orsimilar-minded people than it actually contains in its owndatabaseEven more distributed scenario involving general blogs ordiscussion fora is conceivable using OPOL

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Example SPARQL query

PREFIX o p o l : <...>PREFIX dcterms : <...>PREFIX d o l i t e : <...>SELECT ? t i t l e (COUNT(? g o a l ) AS ? s o l u t i o n s )WHERE {

GRAPH <...> {? i s s u e a o p o l : P o l i t i c a l I s s u e .? i s s u e dcterms : t i t l e ? t i t l e .

OPTIONAL {? p l a n d o l i t e : p roper−p a r t ? g o a l .? g o a l o p o l : i s s o l u t i o n o f ? i s s u e .

}GROUP BY ? i d ? t i t l eORDER BY DESC(? s o l u t i o n s )

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Example SPARQL query—Result Set

title solutions

“Bark beetles in Sumava” 3

“Corruption” 3

“Broken sidewalk” 2

“High criminality at Charles’ square” 2

“Diminishing greenery in cities” 1

“Interests are too high” 1

“Taxes are too high” 1

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Conclusion I

The public discourse is largely heterogeneous

dedicated ePart sitesgeneral on-line forablogs, . . .

Public/political issues are often complex

It is hard to find an integrated overview of people’s opinion

The Semantic Web technologies are capable to solve manyof these problems by opening up what now are closed datasilos

We created an ontology, which is based on many currentlyexisting and widely adopted standards

We designed and implemented a proof-of-conceptsocial-semantic web portal, which is fully backed by theSemantic Web technology

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Conclusion II

This design brings a high level of interoperability andopenness hardly achievable by any other technology

This may help to overcome chicken-egg problem of newinitiatives

Open access to knowledge created is (usually) moreconform with democracy

Knowledge technology helps to construct betterrecommendation which fosters the social interaction in thesystem

We plan to extend the prototype and test it in a real-worlduse-case at region of a small town at Prague-West area

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Acknowledgement

We gratefully acknowledge support provided by the CSF (CzechScience Foundation) project P202/10/0761,

“Web Semantization”.

Thank you for your attention!

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Questions&Comments

Supporting Self-Organization in Politics by the Semantic Web Technologies

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