Plenary Speeches of the Parliament of Finland as Linked Open Data and Data Services

This paper presents a new open infrastructure called ParliamentSampo for studying the parliamentary culture, language, and activities of politicians in Finland. For the first time, the entire time series of some million plenary speeches of the Parliament of Finland (PoF) since 1907 have been converted into data and data services in unified formats, including CSV, Parla-CLARIN, ParlaMint, and RDF Linked Open Data (LOD). The speech data have been interlinked with an ontology and a knowledge graph about the activities of the Members of Parliament (MP) and other speakers in the plenary sessions of the PoF, enriched by data linking from external data sources into a broader ontology-based LOD service. Knowledge extraction techniques based on Natural Language Processing (NLP) were used for automatic semantic annotations and topical classification of the speeches. The data and data services have been used in Digital Humanities (DH) research projects and for application development, especially for developing the in-use semantic portal ParliamentSampo. The infrastructure was published on February 14th 2023 on the Web using the open CC BY 4.0 license, and quickly gathered thousands of users.Peer reviewe