Ontologies for Representing Relations among Political Agents

TL;DR

This paper introduces ontologies to formally represent and analyze relations among political agents, enhancing semantic understanding of influence within political systems, exemplified through a Brazilian linked data project.

Contribution

It presents a novel set of ontologies for modeling relations among political agents, enabling more precise semantic analysis of influence in political systems.

Findings

Ontologies effectively model direct and indirect relations among political agents.

Application to Brazilian political data demonstrates practical utility.

Ontologies are adaptable to various political systems.

Abstract

The Internet and the Web are now an integral part of the way most modern societies, and corresponding political systems, work. We regard Political systems as the formal and informal political processes by which decisions are made concerning the use, production and distribution of resources in any given society. Our focus in on the sets of agents - Persons and Organizations - that govern a society, and their relations. We present a set of ontologies aimed at characterizing different kinds of direct and indirect relations that occur within a Political System. The goal is to provide a more semantically precise basis for determining more abstract notions such as "influence". These ontologies are being used for the "Se Liga na Politica" project, whose goal is to provide an open linked data database of Political Agents in Brazil. Whereas they are being used in a particular political system, these ontologies can be applied to different political systems.