Researchers from Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), VU University (VU), Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR), Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) and the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vison have been awarded the Lodlam Open Data Prize for the Polimedia research project. The prize is an award for Linked Open Data in the field of Library Archives and Museums and was handed out at the LODLAM Summit in Sydney, Australia. Polimedia aims to stimulate and facilitate large scale cross media analysis of political events and is beneficial for researchers in communication science, politics, history and journalism.
The main result of the research project is Polimedia.nl, a public web portal that links political debates to news articles that cover them over a timespan of fifty years, until 1995. In the project, the debate archives of the Dutch Parliament, and archives of newspapers and radio bulletins from the National Library of the Netherlands, have been connected to each other. The web service enables analysis of media coverage of politicians and political events and shows how debates and arguments have developed over time.
"If you search for example on 'Independence Suriname'" explains CWI researcher Laura Hollink, "it shows that this topic has been debated frequently during 1974 and 1975 and which speeches, political parties and politicians attracted a lot of media attention. Further, the search environment also offers accessibility to the original news articles from 1974 and 1975."
CWI, VU, EUR, the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision and DANS currently collaborate in a follow-up project called 'Talk of Europe', in which the debates of the European Parliament are published as Linked Open Data. The result is an online accessible database of what is said in the plenary meetings of the European Parliament, with translations in 22 different languages, including names of politicians, the countries they represent and the national and European parties and committees they are a member of.
