Media, politics and the semantic web

The media play an important role in the functioning of our society. This role is extensively studied by Communication Scientists, requiring a systematic analysis of media content. The methods developed in this field utilize complex data models and background knowledge. This data is generally represented ad hoc, making it difficult to analyze, combine and share data sets. In this paper we present our work on formalizing this representation using RDF(S). We discuss the requirements for a good representation, highlighting a number of non-trivial modeling decisions. We conclude with a description of the resulting system and the benefits for a recent investigation of the 2006 Dutch parliamentary campaign. This case study shows concrete improvements for annotating, querying, and analyzing data, but also indicates a number of aspects that were more difficult to model in RDF(S), contributing to the discussion on modeling with and improving RDF(S) and associated tools