Bringing Parliamentary Debates to the Semantic Web

An analysis of parliamentary debates and media resources that cover them can provide insight into the political climate of a country. Although debates are now regularly published on official government portals, their analysis remains a cumbersome and challenging task for historians and political scientists. One of the main tasks of the PoliMedia project is to allow easy crossmedia comparisons and give better insight into choices that different types of media outlets make when covering parliamentary debates. As a first step of that task, Dutch parliamentary debate data available in XML files is being translated into Semantic Web standards, which will allow users to easily query the data. In this paper we discuss design choices we made to build a semantic model that will represent events and topics from the Dutch parliamentary debates.