Seeking Examples of Structured Journalism Around Parliamentarians

[Eva Constantaras]

Hi,

I'm working on the design of a project for a Central American media house that wants to develop  a tool that tracks parliamentarians based on available data, which in this case most likely include: voting record, attendance, possibly business ownership, judicial information and tax return data.  They want to integrate the tool into the entire newsroom so these profiles auto populate every time the parliamentarian is mentioned in a story. Do you know examples of something like this?  This is what I know about but as you can see they are mostly developed by CSOs. I want to show them a wide range of examples so they can choose relevant features.

1.   http://everypolitician.org/ https://www.mysociety.org/democracy/ http://www.poderopedia.org/ http://wepc2016.org/en/hackathon-wepc2016 http://www.theyworkforyou.com/ https://www.votes.mp/ http://info.mzalendo.com/

Thanks,

Eva Constantaras

Data Journalism Advisor, Internews

[Miguel Paz]

Many ways to do it. However one thing is story esiting and another one is data editing. This means that in any case you will have to have someone assigned to checking on a regulat basis that everything is going well in the workflow (think of it as a tagging sheriff of sorts). There are simple to medium to complicated ways and you should choose the one according to budget, talent and time.
When you say that whenever a politician is mentioned you want that to be sent to a profile page do you mean: name, date, headline, link or what?
Things to consider: database unification and or teconciliation.
You could perfectly say:
Stories side of database
Structures data repository of profiles
Rule: whenever a story has a name (from a dictionary of names) before publishing pass the text trough a entity extraction tool (Open Calais or others) and store X info in the profile of that name in the structures data repository of profiles. Another way if you are working with Wordpress add custom field with rules for manes and create a topic page. Something more complex but doable add a tag to the name like the @Name in Facebook and create rule for matching amd sending to profile page. Other ways to look at The Giardian taxonomy and semantic web structured syatem to see how they do it or ask Jacqui Maher. Look at sports data models and also organizations that build evertyhing around APIs. Please remember: if you dont have the money for complex tech stacks and to recruit experts on it, avoid it and go for the simplest cheapest option. It may not be perfect but it will help you improve step by step rather than sped a long time planning and doong backend stuff loosing momentum and wasting money.
A friend of mine who loves semantic web and has taken a stab to it many times has a saying: while you spend a year building ontologies and mapping the data according to it, a 19 year old kid came in and used a spreadsheet to create a startup, sold it and did two more before you launched.
I am on the subway. When I get to a computer I can share many examples. You can start by checking the influence mappers toolbox new version