Between 2020 and 2021 I supported the digital democracy initiative “Open Parliament TV” as a freelance data scientist.
About Open Parliament TV
Open Parliament TV (OPTV) is an interactive video portal and search engine for parliamentary speeches.
OPTV makes debates in the German Bundestag more transparent, accessible and easier to understand. It is a valuable source for scientific analyses, journalist reports and fact-checking. And a critical tool for every citizen.
OPTV is open source and can be extended to other parliaments besides the German Bundestag, such as state parliaments, city council meetings, meetings of the European Parliament and other national parliaments.
OPTV was created by Joscha Jaeger and has received support by organizations such as Correctiv and Abgeordnetenwatch, as well as the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research.
What I did
My task as a data scientist was to enrich the data corpus about the German Bundestag by additional data about the speakers (members of parliament), and to package this into a reusable script that can be integrated into the overal data ingestion workflow.
Therefore we accessed openly accessible data from WikiData. WikiData is the machine-readable twin of Wikipedia. WikiData is queried using a query language named SPARQL. We also made use of the abgeordnetenwatch.de API.
I developed a module which enabled an automated workflow for the linking and ingestion of WikiData data into the OPTV database. The result was a workflow script that can easilly be run on demand or in an automated way.
Technicalities
Some technical keywords: Named Entity Recognition (NER), Named Entity Linking (NEL), Linked Open Data
Related articles:
- I wrote this Medium article: 10 useful things about Wikidata & SPARQL that I wish I knew earlier
- A news article about OPTV: “Wie macht ihr 28.000 Videoaufzeichnungen von Parlamentsreden interaktiv durchsuchbar?”
