Article:		GovTrack.us, Public Data, and the Semantic Web
Subject:		Swedish law xmlized by student, too
Date:		2006-02-10 01:43:08
From:		Pär Lannerö
A law student who previously worked as a programmer has made something similar in Sweden. His site, http://lagen.nu/ is based on xml files generated from lots of raw text sources by a python script. Except for the clean and efficient web interface, the xml files can be downloaded for anybody to further process. No RDF content, so far.

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• Swedish law xmlized by student, too
  2006-03-01 20:28:55 somegeek
  
  hi
  I was wondering if it is possible to use this kind of data (metadata) to build a psearch engine that is able to take in queries on a certain Senator or a certain bill and return that information to the user.
  i was thinking of using the popular search engine Nutch and customize it to do this kind of searches

  
  Do you think this is possible

  
  thanks
  ilango
  
  

  • Making a search engine
    2006-03-12 05:00:00 JoshuaTauberer
    
    Yes, and some people have already tried to make search engines over semantic web data. Search on TAP (http://sp02.stanford.edu/) and Swoogle (http://swoogle.umbc.edu/) come to mind.

    
    The limiting factor here is that there's simply very little data in RDF out there to use. Google is so great because there are 20 billion web pages indexed, each containing hundreds or thousands of "bits" of information (in this case, words). That's at least in the trillions of words. If I had to guess, there are probably less than 200 million RDF triples out there on the web (of real-life data, and not counting info on proteins from UniProt), the majority of which coming from just a handful of sources.

    
    But also consider that the semantic web makes new types of question-answering applications possible. Search engines can't answer 'questions' with any accuracy unless the question is "who is using this word on their page?". The SW provides the structure for accurately answering a new, larger class of questions. We're going to have to think up new and better user interfaces for getting answers out of the semantic web.

    
    People are working on this in various places in various ways. The idea of question-answering (in general) is a big topic in computational linguistics.